My Consumer Autobiography: Reflections on a Year of Digital Reading

What do our reading choices say about us–not just what we read, but how we do it? In My Consumer Autobiography, Library Futures Research Network member A.J. Boston examines that question by interweaving a log of the books he reads over the course of a year with observations about how he reads them–in print or in ebook form, and whether those titles are purchased, borrowed, or licensed.

Boston asks what the technology behind digital reading is doing not to his brain as a reader (in the manner of The Shallows and a hundred online think-pieces) but rather what it is doing to our ideas about books, libraries, and readers and the social and economic contracts we have historically made among them.

As a consumer of books, Boston notes that although he could have borrowed every book he read that year, “I largely support one single international retailer that spies on me and gives me fewer rights in exchange for my money.” As he makes his way through Min Jin Lee’s Panchinko, two books on architecture while daydreaming about building his own house, the collected poems of Louise Glück, the Ice Planet Barbarians series, and many more, Boston reflects on how he acquires these books and the practical, cultural, and financial pros and cons of every service he uses.

Who benefits when you borrow a book from a library? What royalties do authors receive through streaming services? What are the ethics of reading a PDF online? And ultimately, Boston asks, how do these questions change when the consumer is not an individual but a library?

As an individual consumer, I am nimble: able to buy, borrow, or lease where I may; join or leave services as I please; take advantage of deals as they are offered. Libraries as buyers do not enjoy these luxuries, with budgets that need to remain stable from year to year while serving diverse constituencies.

For those of us who have experienced anxiety about the acquisition of digital media, or anyone interested–as we are–in “the affordances of ebooks and the legal and technological web governing them,” My Consumer Autobiography is a thought-provoking and compelling read.