Amazon leads the market in ebooks with the Kindle brand, which encompasses a range of dedicated e-reader devices and a large ebook store. Kindle users are able to share the experience of reading ebooks purchased from Amazon by selecting passages of text for upload to the Kindle Popular Highlights website. In this article, I propose that the Kindle Popular Highlights database contains evidence that readers are re-appropriating commonplacing -the act of selecting important passages from a text and recording them in a separate location for later re-use -while reading public domain titles on theKindle. An analysis of keyness in a corpus of 34,044 shared highlights from public domain titles suggests that readers focus on words relating to philosophy and values to draw an understanding of contemporary society from these classic works. This form of highlighting takes precedent over understanding and sharing key narrative moments.An examination of the top ten most popular authors in the corpus, and case studies of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, demonstrates variation in highlighting practice as readers are choosing to shorten famous commonplaces in order to change their context for an audience that extends beyond the original reader. Through this analysis, I propose that Kindle users' highlighting patterns are shaped by the behaviour of other readers and reflect a shared understanding of an audience beyond the initial highlighter.

Since the mid-2000s, the ebook has stabilized into an ontologically distinct form, separate from PDFs and other representations of the book on the screen. The current article delineates the ebook from other emerging digital genres with recourse to the methodologies of platform studies and book history. The ebook is modelled as three concentric circles representing its technological, textual and service infrastructure innovations. This analysis reveals two distinct properties of the ebook: a simulation of the services of the book trade and an emphasis on user textual manipulation. The proposed model is tested with reference to comparative studies of several ebooks published since 2007 and defended against common claims of ebookness about other digital textual genres

The use of computational methods to develop innovative forms of storytelling and poetry has gained traction since the late 1980s. At the same time, legacy publishing has largely migrated to using digital workflows. Despite this possible convergence, the electronic literature community has generally defined their practice in opposition to print and traditional publishing practices more generally. Not only does this ignore a range of hybrid forms, but it also limits non-digital literature to print, rather than considering a range of physical literatures. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to consider physical and digital literature as convergent forms as both a historicizing process, and a way of identifying innovations. Case studies of William Gibson et al.’s Agrippa ( A Book of the Dead) and Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Project’s playful use of innovations in genetics demonstrate the productive tensions in the convergence between digital and physical literature.

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In order to explore monograph peer review in the Arts and Humanities, this article introduces and discusses an applied example, examining the route to publication of Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo's Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (2013). The book's co-authors supplemented the traditional "blind" peer review system with a range of practices including the informal, DIY review of colleagues and "clever friends," as well as using the feedback derived from grant applications, journal articles, and book chapters. The article "explodes" the book into a series of documents and non-linear processes to demonstrate the significance of the various forms of feedback to the development of Fuller and Rehberg Sedo's monograph. The analysis reveals substantial differences between book and article peer review processes, including an emphasis on marketing in review forms and the pressures to publish, that the co-authors navigated through the introduction of "clever friends" to the review processes. These findings, drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), demonstrate how such a research methodology can identify how knowledge is constructed in the Arts and Humanities, and potential implications for the valuation of research processes and collaborations.