This means that researchers can access detailed data about readers’ response: comments that readers write while they are reading, briefly (and spontaneously) interrupting their activity before continuing it. On Wattpad, readers share their thoughts and emotional reactions to specific paragraphs, not just to the whole book as in the case of online reviews. This is because of two reasons: first, there is a huge volume of reading happening on digital social platforms like Wattpad on a worldwide scale secondly, users’ comments in the margins can be an extremely valuable resource for empirically studying readers’ responses. If literary studies want to understand the reading culture of the youngest generations in the 21st century, we need to consider the phenomenon of digital social reading.

In short, there will soon be more books in computers and digital shelves than in our material literary collections. As a comparison, the US Library of Congress-one of the biggest libraries in the world-has around 39 million catalogued books and “nonclassified prints”, and more than 72 million manuscripts, collected over 200 years of activity. This bibliographic treasure is a fast and steadily growing collection of short stories, novels, and poems published on the online platform Wattpad. There are at least 30 million books almost always ignored when talking about how and how much people read nowadays. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character’s behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction.

By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age.

Wattpad stories meaning