And yet the question remains: How can it be that a digital platform, of all things, leads young people to read more? How can it be that those who are often described as having short attention spans—who swipe and scroll in seconds—are suddenly drawn to a medium that promises the opposite: depth, slowness, and permanence?
Unlike Instagram, where beige feeds, soft-focus selfies, and curated vacation dumps dominate the content, TikTok stands for the opposite—immediacy, emotion, realness. People on TikTok openly share negative experiences, cry on camera, discuss red carpet looks from their beds, or talk about books while rolling their eyes, furrowing their brows, and raising their voices. And this—authenticity, unfilteredness—is exactly what drew me to the app from the start. Isn’t that also what literature is also about? Not just consuming but diving in, getting outraged, grieving, swooning.
Relatedly, a survey of BookTok bestseller lists published by Barnes & Noble, Pan Macmillan, and other major booksellers reveals a clear pattern: almost exclusively, the books that rank are romance, fantasy, and new adult. Where professional critics tend to focus their reviews on bluechip biographies and literary fiction, a distinct and dynamic reading culture thrives on BookTok, reveling in genres once only discussed in book clubs or Reddit threads.
The downsides of BookTok
But before I get too carried away: There are, of course, some negative sides to BookTok too. For one thing, the same works are pushed over and over again. (I don’t even want to know how many times I’ve seen videos about books that are sold as “hidden gems,” yet have been on bestseller lists for weeks.) There’s also pressure to read an incredible amount (in my opinion, videos that feature ultra-short books to help viewers boost their end-of-year tally miss the point; reading is not a competition!)—and to spend quite a lot of money. (BookTok is all about buying new, but don’t forget your local libraries and secondhand book shops!)
Another slightly disconcerting trend is the rise of so-called “dark romance” books—those in which the stalker becomes the lover, schoolgirls fall for their teachers, and kidnapped women fall in love with their captors. These books romanticize toxic, manipulative, or abusive relationships, glorifying extreme power imbalances and violent sex scenes, and their popularity, in the age of the manosphere, strikes me as troubling.
