Does a Film Adaptation of a Novel Influence Reading Behavior? the Answer Is on the Web

Part of our lives has moved to the web. On the web, we work, get in touch, shop, manage our bank account, search information, share music, download documents, or watch news. There is no doubt that an important piece of what we do every day gets somehow reflected there, even reading. Librarians know very well that they can take advantage of the web to involve their users, especially the youngest. Libraries nowadays publish blogs, have Facebook accounts, organize online book clubs and offer reference services online. However, the web is also a way to keep track of people’s tastes and changing preferences, and maybe librarians are less prepared to use the web to monitor and follow reading behaviors. Indeed, the web offers the opportunity to study all kind of social phenomena, including reading behavior, and this is something webometricians are well aware of, as explained in the second edition of Mike Thelwall’s Introduction to webometrics 1 and the recently published Web metrics for library and information professionals by David Stuart.2 The purpose of this article is to see how the web can reflect reading behavior, by collecting some data from social networks devoted to books and readers and from other less specific, though relevant, web sources. More precisely, we look at how user activity changes when a novel is adapted and turned into a movie. Does an adaptation on screen