Secret Reading Lives, Revealed - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"While the history of the book is well established, the history of reading has really come together in the last two decades, according to Shafquat Tow­heed, a lecturer in English at the Open University in Britain and director of the Reading Experience Database, or RED. "We're beginning to get students studying it as an option at the graduate level and the undergraduate level," Towheed says. The existence of online resources such as RED has helped push the field along. The brainchild of Simon Eliot, another influential figure in the history of reading, RED dates back to the 1990s but was revamped as an online resource in 2006....The open-access database collects accounts of British reading experiences from 1450 to 1945, and has gathered about 31,000 records so far...."