Whose Good Reads?: Comparing Results of the 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards and Professionally Curated Lists
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2021-06-30
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en
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Abstract
Goodreads has steadily developed into the biggest book-based social media platform since its launch in 2007. One of the pillars of the website includes the Goodreads Choice Awards, a yearly event in which regular readers are allowed to vote for their favourite books of the year. This phenomenon bears a strong similarity with how professional agents uphold the tradition of publishing ‘best of’-lists at the end of every year. The aim of this thesis has therefore been to analyse the results of the Choice Awards and several best of-lists in relation to the year 2020, all in order to compare and contrast the taste of non-professional readers and professional agents within the literary field. The combination of this aim and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory regarding the field of cultural production has allowed for a new contribution to the ongoing research on Goodreads: analyses of eleven different factors regarding the taste of these two groups of readers have found that they strongly resemble each other, as the factors are made up of the same dominant options for each group.
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