BookTok is changing how Gen Z reads -  but is it for the better?

TL;DR 

A fun-sized summary of this article

The publishing industry is putty in our hands; BookTok gives readers a major say in

what books hit the shelves and bestseller lists. 

BookTok has buzz - but it also has haters. In many ways, the online space has extended our culture’s obsession with aesthetics to literature.

BookTok is making us read more, but its trends are not immune to the consumerist behavior pervasive in online spaces.

The new fad of the digital age is in: reading. No, but really, books are coming back in a big way, with social media changing our relationship with literature and its place in the culture. 

It should be no surprise that TikTok is a major catalyst in this; take 2020 quarantine boredom and couple it with an understandable desire for escapism, and you’ll have the perfect, algorithmically primed petri dish for a new spin on an old hobby. Now, in 2024, BookTok has become so influential that the publishing industry follows its lead. 

The rise of BookTok

BookTok is a community made up of casual readers, novice writers, cosplayers and reviewers making a communal space to engage with the stories they love. It’s played a pivotal role in circulating books from marginalized communities and POC creators into conversation, broadening the scope of what gets published and promoted. 

Though the ceaseless in-fighting can often feel like the Fandom Thunderdome, BookTok does have space for everyone. It’s a patchwork community of interconnected niches, and works a bit like a massive book club. And boy, does this club rake in profits; BookTok has been credited with a 51% increase in adult fiction sales in 2022, and accumulated 200 billion views on the platform by the end of 2023. 

On top of that, its influence extends beyond FYPs; retailers like Barnes & Noble have dedicated sections for BookTok recommendations in their stores, a clever fusion of digital and physical retail strategies to tap into the buzz of what’s trending. Because BookTok content is primed for virality on the platform, its trends often translate to tangible increases in book sales, as well as visibility for more obscure titles. TikTok literally reshaped the industry - some might even say it revolutionized it.

The Controversy 

And yet, for every new trend, there will be its legion of dedicated haters - who sometimes actually have a good point. The internet is still aesthetics over substance, and that is quite a nasty recipe when it comes to literature. Critics argue that BookTok is pivoting the publishing industry into a "fast fashion" model, where the trend cycle spits out massive quantities of low-quality products that subsist off of the same 3 tropes knocking each other off. Book hauls are now a thing, and they consist of special editions that cost 50 bucks a pop and crates of book merch. While BookTok may be a democratizing force in literature, it also exists within the indulgences of our consumerist culture, a fact that undeniably echoes through its content. 

But, on the other hand, every generation blames the shiny, next-big-thing in publishing as a threat to the sanctity of literature - often developments that make reading more accessible across race, gender and class, from yellowbacks to penny dreadfuls. People hated e-readers, audiobooks and Amazon for like a decade. BookTok has helped to diversify the literary canon and it’s readers; but our toxic relationship with social media and consumerism may also have an equal hand in degrading it.