How much does the symbolic capital of books cost? Operationalizing the prestige of books in the digital age

Social prestige refers to another crucial concept in literary studies namely, literary evaluation—as it is the result of an evaluative process to which a subject or group submits a cultural object. We found the best definition for the attribution of literary value in the studies of two German scholars: Renate von Heydebrand and Simone Winko. According to von Heydebrand and Winko, the evaluation of a literary text has to take into account both social and individual aspects. The authors elaborated a model that helps to evaluate literature in a pluralistic way, since it includes social functions related to literature and abandons the notion of literary quality as an intrinsic characteristic of the text. Based on the model of Heydebrand&Winko we have created a questionaire to assess the perception of literary value in actual readers.