Reading Cultures
New Publication: The Richard and Judy Bookclub Reader
The Reading Experience Database http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/
The Reading Experience Database (RED) was launched in 1996 at the UK Open University. Its mission is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945. The project has had to determine a definition of reading which is very useful ”in the interests of clarity and manageability we have had to exclude certain of these ‘reading experiences’ as outside our remit. For our purposes, a ‘reading experience’ means a recorded engagement with a written or printed text – beyond the mere fact of possession. A database containing as much information as possible about what British people read, where and when they read it and what they thought of it will form an invaluable resource for researchers of book history, cultural studies, sociology and family history, to name but a few”.
