It has long been argued that digital textuality fundamentally alters familiar conceptions of literary authorship. Critics such as Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and Mark Poster have articulated a conception whereby the interactive affordances of digital textuality level the playing field between author and reader. Rather than consuming the text passively, readers become “coauthors,” actively creating a unique narrative through their interactions and narrative choices. While these bold prophesies may not have materialized, digital textuality has worked to challenge the model of individual authorship. This chapter looks at two contemporary practices that serve to promote and “normalize” group authorship: fanfiction and social reading. It provides a literary history of collective authorship and analyzes the pressure that fan sites like FanFiction.net and An Archive of Our Own are putting on our conventional means of evaluating literary excellence, notably by challenging conceptions of originality and distinctiveness. It also considers how another facet of digital reading – social reading, as practiced on sites like Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter – is creating new feedback loops between authors and readers, facilitating the development of new “interpretive communities,” and working to undermine the centrality of the solitary genius and the solitary reader to literary production and reception.

Salman Rushdie is perhaps one of the most recognizable global literary writers. This emerged in the early 1980s when his work was seen as the quintessential exponent of the Indian novel in English. Distinctive marketing campaigns by publishers, as well as speculation about his advances and publishing deals, have further fuelled the success of the Rushdie brand. This chapter considers issues of reception that relate to Rushdie’s position in the literary marketplace and combines a review of some of the available sales figures with readers’ comments about Rushdie’s novels on online book reviewing sites. It addresses Rushdie’s position in the context of the consolidation of the Anglo-American publishing world through a series of mergers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and the significant impact this has had on the way in which literary works are disseminated. It considers what readers’ reviews of his novels and the existence of a critical apparatus, including annotations and study guides, reveal about the classification of Rushdie’s fiction and the constitution of his audience, and it reviews concepts of reading, not reading, and partial reading with a view to the Rushdie affair.