Fantasy literature has a rather strong position in countries with an English-speaking population but not in Sweden. The supply of fantasy in Sweden is much smaller than that in for example United Kingdom. Does this affect the Swedish readers of this genre? If it does, how does it affect them? The aim of this thesis is to find out how a few fantasy-reading students at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science get hold of the fiction they want to read and who and/or what influence their decision of which book to read. In order to avoid confusion we are also going to try to find out how they define fantasy since it varies from person to person what is included in the genre. To get a result we interviewed eight students using the method of qualitative interviews. Then we analyzed the result using George Kingsley Zipf’s principle of least effort, the theory of the economic man and Patrick Wilson’s cognitive authority. The result show that almost all of the students have the same definition of fantasy and uses different ways to get hold of fantasy compared to how they get hold of other kinds of fiction. It also shows that most of them have different influences when choosing a book in the genre of fantasy and when choosing a book from a different genre. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The aim of this master thesis is to examine readers’ advice in weblogs - frequently modified web pages with a series of archived entries. We have chosen to study a specific kind of entry that contains information about a book of fiction- not for children and young adults - and the bloggers’ comments regarding that same book. The entries are published in ten weblogs that all deal with literature and reading. Five of these are maintained by one or more individuals, and the other five are maintained by employees at six libraries. The research questions focus on the similarities and differences between the entries containing readers’ advice published in the individual and the library weblogs. To be able to answer our questions we have conducted observations of the chosen weblogs, studied the published entries by applying a number of set criteria, and made asynchronous e-mail interviews. Theoretical frames and concepts are derived from research fields of literature, literary sociology and library and information science. The love of reading is the main reason for the selection of books being written about in the individual weblogs. The opportunities to market and highlight the library, the library stocks and the librarian’s knowledge of literature are also important to the staffs who work with the library weblogs. / Program: Bibliotekarie