Bookishness

Qualities or characteristics of traditional books retained or evoked in digital media, highlighting the ongoing influence of print culture on digital forms
Maxi Laumann 2026-08-07

Explication

Before the 21st century’s turn toward digitalization, bookishness was used to describe “the quality of being bookish; fondness for books or study; learning. Frequently somewhat disparaging” (Oxford English Dictionary, “Bookishness, n.”). One of the earliest entries in the Oxford English Dictionary regarding bookishness, from 1685, reads “Much Learning or Bookishness hath distracted thee” (Baxter Acts xxvi. 24). For centuries, bookishness has been understood as a devotion to reading, studying, and academia, derived from the adjective ‘bookish,’ defined as “enthusiastic or serious about reading books; studious” (Oxford English Dictionary). Bookishness and bookish were associated with Enlightenment ideals of the liberal human, namely, individuals open to education and social uplift through books (Pressman 33). However, our contemporary understanding of bookishness is a digital “twenty-first-century phenomenon” (1). Our digital infrastructures and their  affordances have reduced the practical necessity of physical book copies and enabled other forms of publishing, discourse, and reading (Johnson 2); nonetheless, the desire for books persists (2). Hence, Pressman explains bookishness as “creative acts that engage the physicality of books within a digital culture, in modes that might be sentimental, fetishistic, radical” (1). Bookishness foregrounds a preoccupation with the materiality of books (2) and refers to being near books. It is an identity derived from physical proximity to books, not only from reading them (10). So, in its contemporary usage, bookishness refers to a culturally and digitally mediated attachment to books that extends beyond reading itself. 

Decades-old claims about the death of the book due to digitalization only further invite bookishness. Melancholy about the end of the physical book leads to a yearning for a bookish culture and for digital illustrations or representations of books (Pressman 27). This initiates a process of remediation, namely the “remediation of the book” (88), in which digital media culture refashions the aesthetics of print while simultaneously transforming its social functions. Nowadays, books are alluded to even when they are not physically present. Digital platforms imitate the physical form of books: web pages styled as printed pages, whooshing page flips on tablets (Pressman 35–36), digital bookshelves on Goodreads, iBooks, or Kindle, and e-readers and laptops open to pages. Across social media, bookishness manifests as visual and performative practices. Pinterest features boards dedicated to bookish fashion and pins of bookshelves. Facebook communities share reading experiences and book club discussions. BookTok publishes videos about the aesthetics of hardcovers with colored edges, and Instagram users share #shelfies, bookshelf variants of the selfie. With shelfies, the term ‘bookshelf porn’, “used to describe images of bookshelves lusted after by their viewers” (Rodger 481), came into existence. Shelfies create more than an urge to read; they cause an urge to be surrounded by books and to feel engaged with their affective powers. Proximity to books is portrayed as a desirable lifestyle. The bookshelf is the backdrop of a bookish identity, and the book as an object of display as much as of interpretation. (Rodger 482). Bookshelves, originally physical spaces, become “digital spaces” (Henrickson 8). An intertextuality of narratives about books across media emerges as books are displayed alongside other titles, genres, authors, covers, and reading practices. Online viewers read the bookshelf itself as a curated narrative of literary taste and identity (Henrickson 7). Thus, bookishness is a collective identity performance that is a cultural expression of a devotion to books in both material and increasingly digital forms.  

The rise of online book communities suggests that an increasing share of book-related interaction occurs digitally (Pressman 36). Bookishness encompasses online practices, including highlighting passages on one’s Kindle, publishing reviews and ratings on platforms like Goodreads, posting photos of one’s current reads, and creating or participating in reading challenges (Birke 153). These digital practices resonate with users because their reading can be entangled in “different kinds of sociality” (Birke 170). Users can choose between private interactions, such as highlighting favorite passages in their e-books, and public forms of engagement that make their reading visible and enable them to interact with other readers, such as online reviews, ratings, reading updates, and interpretations. Even new communities can form around a published digital product (Johnson 5), as seen in an interactive book app of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road by Penguin Books US, _Folger Luminary’s _ Shakespeare Apps, and children’s book apps such as the Dr. Seuss Treasury App. Furthermore, Liu argues that books and bookishness “can be new media to the extent that they are what they have always been: ‘social media’” (517). Bookishness does not become social solely through digital platforms, since books have always mediated knowledge through institutions, discourses, and reading practices. In digital culture, this function continues through new technological forms that extend beyond the printed book (Liu). 

In conclusion, bookishness marks the persistence of the book in a digitized culture. It shows that the migration of reading to screens does not make the physical book disappear from the cultural imagination. Instead, books continue to appear as objects of display, memory, or affiliation, as digital environments have made the book newly available as an image, symbol, and marker of identity. Nowadays, readers not only read books but also collect, arrange, share, and perform them as part of a broader culture of literary belonging.

See Also

• Digital Narrative - Form of storytelling driven by algorithmic narrativity, inflected and mediated by computation, or the context of ubiquitous technological networks
• Electronic Literature (e-lit) - Variety of born-digital genres and formats that engage the capabilities of computing, often investigating the materiality of our everyday interactions with digital media
• Materiality - Physical qualities and characteristics of digital media, emphasizing the importance of the medium itself in the creation and interpretation of texts
• Remediation - Representation or incorporation of a creative work into a newer medium

Works Referenced

Baxter, Richard. A Paraphrase on the New Testament, with notes. 1685. 

Birke, Dorothee. “Social Reading? On the Rise of a ‘Bookish’ Reading Culture Online.” Poetics Today, vol. 42, no. 2, June 2021, pp. 149–172.  

“Bookish, adj., sense 1.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, September 2025. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026. 

“Bookishness, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, December 2024. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026. 

Henrickson, Leah. “The Book in the Digital Age: An Introduction.” Publishing History, no. 83, 2020, pp. 7–18. 

Johnson, Miriam J. “What Is a Book? Redefining the Book in the Digitally Social Age.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–20. 

Liu, Allen. “The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009.  

Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020. 

Rodger, Nicola. “From Bookshelf Porn and Shelfies to #BookfaceFriday: How Readers Use Pinterest to Promote Their Bookishness.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 473–495.

Further Reading

Plate, Liedeke. “How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age: Anne Carson’s Nox, Multimodality, and the Ethics of Bookishness.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 93–111. 

Murray, Simone. The Digital Literary Sphere. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.  

Noble, Malcolm. “Melting Wax and Warming Hearts: Heartstopper, Scented Candles, and Bookish Social Media.” The New Americanist, vol. 3, no. 1, May 2024, pp. 25–46.  

Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

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