Secret reading. David D/Flickr. Some rights reserved.As whistle-blowing goes, it was a tame example: a misguided volunteer at Japanese library leaked the rather innocuous teenage reading records of the country’s most famous contemporary author Haruki Murakami. There followed an outcry among Japanese librarians.
The story emphasised just how personal our reading choices are. They’re off-the-record unless we want to share them. And perhaps that’s even truer today, when many of us hide behind our non-descript e-book covers, often indulging in guilty pleasures that we have no desire to broadcast to the world. (There’s a reason why Fifty Shades of Grey became Amazon’s best-selling e-book of all time.)
Our reading choices are off-the-record unless we want to share them.
