If you have walked into a bookstore within the past five years, chances are you have seen a table labeled ‘As Seen on BookTok!’ smack-dab in the middle, a beacon to all who have gotten their latest quick reading recommendations from the short-form video app, TikTok.
BookTok, a term coined for the subcommunity of readers on TikTok, has become a prominent hashtag on the app, as well as a marketing gimmick for publishers (loudly proclaimed by the app itself) and bookstores alike. But what has it actually done for reading?
Most videos on BookTok barely make it past the 60-second mark, competing with the decreasing attention spans of viewers and the impatience of those simply consuming the content without wanting to do any actual thinking of their own.
Not new to social media but certainly exacerbated by the popularity and accessibility of TikTok, literature is now forced to be palatable and keep the dwindling attention spans focused on trendy content. Posts are made with an articulately but still somehow effortlessly chosen indie pop song (“Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star seems to be a common choice) while having nothing to do with the literature being advertised.
Being a reader is now an aesthetic without any of the substance. While reading should always be enjoyed by everyone, intellect has become an image rather than a practiced skill. Not only is being a bookworm now “in,” it’s another reinstatement of status.
However, rather than gaining the privilege of education and literary prowess, it is now ‘look at how many books I am able to buy that I have not yet, and maybe never will, read!’. Another popular hashtag through the subgenre is a T.B.R.: the daunting To Be Read list.
Many BookTokers post huge haul videos of their latest buys, stacks of books sometimes taller than they are, only for the same stack to sit in the back of their videos for months on end, collecting dust. All the while, they will continue to make monthly book-buying videos without even having read the books they have already purchased.
Recommendations tend to be the same, regardless of whether the book is well-written; Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas regurgitate the same material over and over again because more young adults are unsure of what to read if someone is not telling them.
Books are watered down by AI voiceovers, classic literature is reduced to hashtags, and nuanced novels are recognized only by whether or not they have an enemies-to-lovers trope, or if they are “spicy,” containing mostly smut rather than plot. Impressionable readers are exposed to an echo chamber of “Expert Readers,” with color-coded bookshelves and fifteen versions of the same novel, showing that perhaps you can be a reader without actually reading.
This past week, I saw a TikTok user (in a video that has since been deleted) going over the books she’d read in order to share how she would read multiple books at a time and finish them within a week or so. Her secret? Entering the books into an AI database so that it would generate a summary for her. The summary, around a few paragraphs, was what she would read in order to count the book as completed.
Collecting literature has become a higher point of interest than the literature itself. It is better to be seen as a curated bibliophile than to sincerely cultivate one’s opinions, critiques or analyses sans anticipation of likes. The critical thinking and beyond surface-level takeaways that come from reading and create productive conversation have been lost in this social media community.
Whether it be because you loved a piece or absolutely detested it, the reasons should be built by your own thoughts instead of reviews from BookTok influencers stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. With the consumerist, conformist tendencies rapidly becoming apparent in the BookTok sphere, that is becoming impossible for anyone to do.
BookTok has made reading and imagination a chore for the supposed reader. Books are now only conduits for instant gratification and spoon-fed metaphors where subtlety goes to die. Nuance is a thing of the past; readers can readily supply themselves with paperbacks of similar plots that get praised for the bare minimum of decent grammar and a love interest that may or may not brood every three pages.
As someone who enjoys reading very much, I can’t help but feel defensive when seeing the onslaught of “easily-bingeable novels that all sort of have the same cover,” as Barry Pierce from GQ puts it. Campy, endearingly termed “junk novels,” are not new, and they have their own fans who hold them dear to their hearts. The combination of a social media-led book industry with the world’s drop in literacy and reading comprehension for both students and adults, however, is.
Bringing people back to reading for pleasure is great—I just hope that thinking for oneself makes a comeback as well.
Arianna Marmol is a second year majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and minoring in Theater
