Book talk on Booktok

This is a blogpost made by moderators (Heejae Lee and Paola Lechuga Santin) of the MA course Digital Social Reading at the University of Basel, based on the week 8 seminar by Sonali Kulkarni.

Author: Heejae Lee

This seminar was held in the middle of November, around week 8 and it was mainly about the literature culture, changed between young adults with TikTok and YouTube. I was a moderator who was leading the discussion part at the end of the seminar after speaker's presentation ends and trying to ask my own questions like below:

  1. At first, I didn't know what BookTok or BookTube is. After reading the related articles, I could understand what it stands for and it was very interesting to me. I wonder why it was interesting to you as author and what subculture or research influenced you the most?

  2. Since the gen z consumes most of the contents through video or edited clips, I want to know how social platforms like TikTok or YouTube change the way that young reader's consume literature and what are the pros and cons of this trends?

  3. If this trend keeps evolving and teen readers are more delved into reviewing and discussion, how do you imagine or draw the future of BookTok and BookTube be like? and if you predict it in positive way, what do you suggest for the next step like in the next few years?

Through these questions, I could solve my own curiosities and get a meaningful understanding of what this trend is about and how it will be evolving in various ways for the future. Since the character of a generation is changed more rapidly now through digitalization, I thought it would be great to know how this trend will affect the book consuming culture.

In today's digital age, the latest generation Z starts to change the way of reading a book in their own style like posting their opinions and reviews on online platform or sharing literary discourse through community based social network services. This contributed to the transformation of consuming and discussing literature. I personally consider these changes as very significant as it is interactive, and peers connect more compared to past book reading styles.

So, in this point of view, the concept of affordance can play an important role in how this feature can build a relation to interact with books for relevant discussion. When it comes to appreciating books, this way is obviously helpful to lower the threshold of approaching literature and making it more accessible. Young readers don’t need to read whole essay, filled with long sentences like past anymore because all they need to do is sharing a moment of immediate reaction through short video.

As the presenter Sonali Kulkarni said, this trend will not remain just a one hit wonder, but it will be evolving and developing its own form and take its place in the contemporary culture of literature consumption. Despite all the weaknesses like lack of range of literary works and low quality of critical discussion, we need to admit that nothing can stop the new generation being digital friendly and accepting their way of communication their reading preferences is valuable and meaningful.

References

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Author: Paola Lechuga

Following into Heejae’s perspective of the topic, I would like to complement her ideas through some statistics:

  • According to Words Rated, BookTok emerged as one of the most influential sources of book discoveries and has greatly affected the publishing industry.

  • In a general overview, BookTok helped the book industry to sell around 20 million books only in 2021. And as for 2023, thanks to BookTok, the author Collen Hoover was able to sell over 4 million copies of her books worldwide.

  • In other statistics, BookTok has improved the amount of readers a 48% in total, and these only including data within the USA.

As part of ongoing growth of popularity and interest in social media, and as our presenter Sonali Kulkarni confirmed, the creation and interest in BookTok has opened a lot of opportunities to explore new areas of publicity of something as classic and long lasting as books are.

“One of the perks of BookTok is that it provides a communal space for readers to interact and learn from each other around the globe. Increased connectivity between readers means that their preferences make more noise, and more power is put into the hands of the everyday consumer, with readers dictating trends and incentivising publishers to cater to their preferences.” (Barnaby, 2023)

BookTok has opened the possibility for renowned enterprises to come in touch with younger audiences. New and old bookstores have found the market of TikTok to incentivize audiences to purchase books widely useful. This demonstrates not only the power of social media to generate interest in different audiences, but also proves that the literary culture will persist no matter what changes can come.

It is important to highlight that these new trends are not only influencing new generations, but in a certain way they have also reached generations with greater knowledge in the literary area. A perfect example is the one our moderator recommended we read about: Judy DuRoss. Judy DuRoss also known as @Bookbookowl is a 41-year-old woman with one of the largest Instagram book communities in Australia. Judy is not only a book content creator on Instagram, but she is a collector of books, reviewer, etc. This example helps us understand that the evolution of literary communities is not only created for very small sectors, but has the possibility of expanding to different niches.

“Watching and sharing short videos of other people relating to your experience while reading a book means you feel connected to others, which coincidentally, is why most users create accounts: to find a connection with people that are passionate about the same thing as you.” (Taylor, 2013)

With this we can expand on the topic and one of the doubts that arose during the seminar:

  • Is it possible that these types of publications have a really significant effect on engagement outside of social media?

It is understandable that on social media many people are interested since many of these images tend to be visually attractive and therefore, there will be people who follow these content creators just for that, but as I mentioned before, authors like Colleen Hoover managed to sell millions of copies of his books thanks to these visual trends.

Moreover, also something interesting our seminarist exposed that BookTok has been able to re-organize the way people read, not only improving it visually but generating a new type of emotional engagement in which new and old readers can relate not only with the content creator but also with the book and it’s communities regarding if you already read the book or not.

References

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