Notas para a compreensão de um novo leitor: o do texto digital

Abstract

The present study is a research concerning fiction text readers, either in printed or digital versions, especially on the World Wide Web. Theoretically, it includes works of recent book historians, such as Alberto Manguel, Roger Chartier and Peter Burke, so that an analysis of this media, its characteristics, readers, and the process of reading could be approached. In order to have a clearer understanding relating to changes that have been brought by the new media today, the change from the text to the hypertext and the advent of the 'cyber literature', I also explore the studies of authors such as Pierre Lévy, Lucia Santaella, and Janet Murray, among others. The corpus considered is composed of some classical literary compositions in digital format such as 'Os Lusíadas' by Luiz Vaz de Camões, and 'Iracema' by José de Alencar, which are compared to printed versions. Having started with the hypothesis that young fiction readers do not read books, I believe that such hypothesis was confirmed; however, it has also been noticed that, even with the Internet, they do not read as much and, a lot of times, the Internet per se is of great usefulness for printed books