Digital media conditions shape new forms of reading. We read on a daily basis on various digital platforms: we read books, we search for information while reading on screens, we use apps on our smartphones, and we read audiobooks. A number of these practices challenge the former print-biased definitions of reading to which we are accustomed, and foreground intermedial practices of aesthetic works. They also challenge how we understand the sensory input that is activated while we read such works and in what contexts such reading takes place. The aim of this paper is to present our analysis of  these extended practises of reading in a digital landscape by proposing reading as a travelling concept (Bal 2002) that moves across different media contexts and moves inbetween disciplinary concerns. Central to our analysis is the material and intermedial interplay between medium and material affordances which in turn shapes the reading experience (Hayles 2005). 

By bringing selected research fields and contributions regarding reading into dialogue with each other, we will exemplify what we see are common scholarly issues when analyzing digital reading today, specifically the multisensory address inherent in many digital texts: we are invited to touch, listen, watch, possibly take part in movement and interaction, look at images and text, listen to the timbre of voices of an audiobook reading and so forth. These elements must, we argue, play a larger role when analyzing these distinctly digital reading conditions (reimagining Jerome McGann’s 1991 analyses of the textual condition). In this paper, through analyses of digital reading situations in Tender Claws Pry (2014) and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) read by Aoife MaMahon that challenge the print bias that is still the foundation of the reading concept, we explore the assumptions and value judgments that imbue the concept of reading.