A few years ago, online book communities were mostly centred around Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and a few blogs. When TikTok came into the scene, it blew up in popularity, and these communities started migrating there. I’ve been a part of online book communities myself for at least eight years, and things have definitely changed significantly in that time.
At first, when BookTok started presenting itself as a TikTok community, it seemed like the content was very straightforward, just like on previous platforms. People would review books, do hauls, share information about book-related events, film vlogs, do reading challenges, etc.
Slowly but surely, these started taking a bit of a turn, and a big online debate began about what BookTok was really meant to be about. Some argued that people were pretending to be readers in order to be deemed as ‘cool’ or ‘smart’, which was leading to a glamorisation of reading, something could already be seen on Instagram, with aesthetic posts of books in beds, huge adorned bookshelves, and colourfully annotated books. This intense focus on the aesthetics of reading was exacerbated on TikTok, enlightening the people who weren’t aware of these online book communities, who then decided to also join in the ‘trend’.
Unfortunately, with time, this community started morphing itself into a commercial, appearance-based corner of the internet, evicting its previous tenants of avid readers simply passionate about books and sharing their opinions. It almost feels as if a sacred space was defiled by the very people it was trying to protect itself from. This may be a bit of a dramatic take on the situation, because I do believe anyone and everyone should feel welcome to join any community they like and have fun. However, it does pose the question: When does a community stop behaving like itself?
BookTok’s commercial trend has birthed a new form of marketing – at most book-selling places nowadays, you’ll be able to find a specific shelf or table labelled ‘BookTok books’, or ‘as seen on BookTok’, clearly used as a tactic to symbolise their popularity and coolness, and that everyone should be reading them. This is problematic in that it floods the community with a very particular type of book or author, which doesn’t leave much space for any other books that could be much better in quality but won’t get any attention because they don’t fit this new mould.
This is infiltrating other online book communities. Social media used to be where we would find our new and different recommendations away from the marketing and popular books seen on bookshops and TV ads, but now we need to dig much deeper to find these – especially if someone is much younger and has just started engaging in these communities.
My final, and most disturbing point, is the fact that a lot of these books that are being advertised and promoted on BookTok are mature books with various explicit sexual or violent content. There’s an overwhelming amount of minors on the app, and there is little to no way to prevent them from coming across these books. I’ve even seen proof of this with my own eyes out in the real world. So many little girls, who are clearly no older than sixteen, have been reading smut books in public, and their parents seemed to be none the wiser in almost every occasion.
Of course, it is also the parents’ job to monitor what their kids are consuming, but with BookTok blowing up, a lot of the cover designers have been making more innocent-looking, cartoonish book covers for the smuttiest, most explicit books they can find. This can certainly be misleading for a parent if their child asks to read one of these books, since they look like they’d be written for young adults at the very oldest.
In general, I don’t think TikTok or BookTok is inherently bad, I just believe that things have spiralled a little out of control and aren’t being used to their full potential. Since it’s so popular, it should be used to give independent authors a platform, to promote less popular works, and to boost content from small publishers and editors, rather than continuing to amplify the already popular book recipe that has been done a million times.
