How BookTok Has Changed Reading Culture Essay

There was a time when finding your next book meant browsing your local bookstore, asking a friend, reading a newspaper review, or simply judging a book by its cover. Now, a few seconds’ worth of TikTok can provide thousands of potential recommendations. It can reintroduce an old novel to a new generation or persuade a book-avoidant individual to read something they were previously uninterested in. Welcome to the world of BookTok.

From Scrolling to Reading

BookTok is the book-focused space that grew out of the app TikTok in late 2020, where readers began posting videos about the books they love, their tears-inducing effect on them, their unending impact on their thoughts, or their perceived necessity for everyone to read.

Its scale is astounding; a 2024 academic review noted that “as of the middle of 2024, more than 35 million TikTok videos had the #BookTok hashtag, and these had accumulated more than 200 billion views.” The academic review on BookTok, unsurprisingly, focuses on it as a space for reviews, but the tag includes a mix of reading recommendations and reading-centric content itself.

Beyond Traditional Book Reviews

Traditional book reviews focus on the mechanics and effects of the book itself - the plot, prose, themes, and literary devices. A BookTok recommendation can be something different entirely, something more personal, where the creator shares their feelings about what the book has done to them specifically and what the reader should do to themselves if they embark on the same journey.

Feelings are a critical component of the BookTok phenomenon; research into the hashtag has noted that while BookTok predominantly hosts emotional responses to books, the system itself has the capacity to create and foster emotional reactions in its users due to its viral and imitative nature.

Old Books, New Audiences

Perhaps contentiously, BookTok has been noted as a space that has brought back old books in a way that the traditional literary sphere has not seen for decades.

A book does not need to be new to find an audience on BookTok; a passionate endorsement can breathe new life into a series that has long since been forgotten by general audiences. Research into the hashtag has noted the ways in which BookTok has pushed backlist books into bestseller lists and has made publishers and booksellers alike take notice of the tag’s power. Indeed, the power of the tag has bled into the physical world; a BookTok recommendation can become a display table at a bookseller’s store, the recommendation given by one reader to another being amplified by both the reach of social media and the perceived power of a novel discovery.

But Has It Changed What We Read?

While BookTok has definitely changed the ways in which we share and discover books, there are questions to be asked about its effects on literary culture.

Romance, fantasy, YA fiction, and the rapidly rising “romantasy” genre dominate the tag’s space, but the books that become recommended are far from the only books worth reading. The algorithms that dictate BookTok’s discoverability can lead to a space that puts certain books on repeated exposure, where one has no way of escaping the same themes and genres over and over again.

There are questions about diversity, too; while research into the hashtag has noted more gender diversity among the authors recommended on BookTok, there are still disparities to be addressed for books featuring POC or LGBTQAC+ characters and authors.

Reading Has Become Social Again

Perhaps the most impactful change that BookTok has made to its users is the return of the social aspect of reading. Instead of reading being a solitary act, one can instead read alongside thousands of people, reading the same book, reacting to the same twists, dissecting the same plot holes, sharing reactions to the same quotes, asking and answering questions about the same characters.

While BookTok has not replaced traditional literary spaces, it has instead built upon them. Its impact can be seen in the ways in which TikTok users engage with each other, but also with the wider literary world. Perhaps this new space has not completely replaced the traditional book review or the in-person interactions at a bookstore or book club, but for some people, it can begin with a fifteen-second video and end with a TikToker closing the app, a book in their hands and the first page open.

Reference

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13548565241301271?utm_