What ever happened to reading alone?

Reading might well have been among the last remaining private activities, but it is now a relentlessly social pursuit. Gaggles of readers get together monthly to sip chardonnay and discuss the latest Oprah selection. On fan sites for the Harry Potter and “Twilight” series, enthusiastic followers dissect plot lines, argue over their favorite scenes and analyze characters. Publishers, meanwhile, are fashioning social networking sites where they hope to attract readers who want to comment on books and one another.
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Publishers are trying to use the increasingly social media landscape to stimulate a new reading culture. “I don’t think they are walking into bookstores in droves, so how do you get to teens and how do you get an author in front of a teen?” said Diane Naughton, vice president for marketing for HarperCollins Children’s Books, which has initiated enterprises including the Amanda Project, a Web site affiliated with a young-adult mystery series, and inkpop, where teenagers can upload their writing and receive commentary from peers and HarperCollins editors.

The concern with some of these sites is that users will spend their time talking to one another rather than reading books — just as some book groups spend more time drinking wine and gossiping than discussing the month’s title. Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer at Simon & Schuster, said executives were concernedwhen they started PulseIt!, a Web site where teenagers can read advance galleys and comment on them. “Did they just want to use our bandwidth to hang out and chat with each other?” Ms. Hirschhorn wondered. But by tracking page views on the digital galleys, she said, “what we found is that they are voracious readers.”

What’s next? More than one toilet per bathroom?