15 Jul Reading over your shoulder

Blogging has broken down many of the previously cherished barriers between public and private, and now it seems that a reader’s right to privacy is, alas, no more.

Julie Wilson’s @SeenReading has been stalking literary Torontonians for a while now, and recently I came across CoverSpy, a New York-based team of “publishing nerds” turned book snoops.

The details of the reader – how they look, what they’re wearing, where they’re going – makes this digital display of reading over your shoulder just that much more voyeuristic, and therefore, that much more exciting. Titillating, one might even say.