For a brief and glorious moment a few weeks ago, we all thought TikTok was finally going to be banned in the United States, until Trump swept in and ruined it, giving the app an extension of 90 days to find a US buyer. I haven’t had TikTok for a few years now and I’ve watched from afar as the online book community, which I first encountered on YouTube, expanded into Instagram and TikTok, filling ‘For You Pages’ across the world with the latest ‘spicy dark romance’, and convincing you that, unless you have 100+ unread shiny hardbacks, you aren’t a ‘real’ reader. Booktok is harming us all, and being banned would have helped all readers.
Here’s the thing: BookTok makes us less curious readers. Think about it — every BookTok recommendation video is just a carousel of the same five books paraded around over and over again. Regardless of whether you like sci-fi, romance, or contemporary fiction, you are going to have Colleen Hoover and The Secret History fed to you constantly and without any variety (I like The Secret History as much as the next person, but come on).
The traditional methods of finding new books, like discovering a reviewer who aligns with you, or a friend recommending something based on your specific tastes, are replaced by an algorithm that has managed to work out you like books, but not enough to work out what specifically you like.
And in turn, this makes you less curious as a reader — you pick something up because you’ve ‘heard on TikTok that it’s good’, rather than being drawn in by the blurb or a trustworthy opinion you’ve heard. You become less likely to go into a bookshop and walk around picking things up and reading the opening lines, and more likely to go straight for the colourfully labelled, carefully marketed BookTok table. Part of the joy of reading is choosing something unexpected or something out of your usual comfort zone — an element that BookTok’s carousel of pink-covered romance books completely obliterates. You won’t try something new if there is already a carefully curated selection waiting for you on your phone.
There’s also something to be said about the way BookTok actually discusses the books it recommends. Generally, when receiving or giving a recommendation, you’ll provide a plot overview, something about the tone or style of the book, and maybe some other details about why you think someone will like a book — it starts a conversation. Even if it’s one you come back to a while later after you’ve read the book, there is still an established dialogue there.
BookTok has found a way to condense thoughts on a book into a series of meaningless attributes or tropes, in a way that completely annihilates any sense of real discussion around a book. Tropes, something proliferated mainly through fanfiction, have found their way into discussion around everyday books. A narrative about connection and friendship can be reduced down to the ‘found-family trope’, which tells you nothing at all about what the book is actually like or how it’s written.
Instead of choosing books based on vibes or good word of mouth, it encourages you to choose fiction just as you chose One Direction fanfiction when you were eleven. I was a Wattpad girl too back in the day, but the two should absolutely be treated as separate things.
The most insidious problem with BookTok, however, is the way anti-intellectualism proliferates around the community. One thing I hear over and over again is ‘let people enjoy things’. And yes, having fun is good and valuable and something we should all do. However, this leads to an extremely dangerous lack of criticism surrounding the books (and TV shows, films and music) we consume. Colleen Hoover is able to sell more books than the Bible, despite the horrific ways she glamorizes domestic abuse, in my opinion.
It speaks to the way BookTok can market books, based on their tropes or just the promise that everyone is talking about them. Any criticism of their content or handling of difficult material is immediately swatted down with a cry of ‘let people have fun!’. It’s your duty as a reader to be critical of what you consume: to work out whether you like something and why, to examine how it treats sensitive material, and how you respond to that.
So how do we reject BookTok? I won’t ask you to delete TikTok altogether (even though it made me feel so much better). Rather than reject the pull of BookTok and its shiny marketing completely, what we need to do is start talking about books again. Ask your friends and family what they’ve read recently. Join a book club (we have a society for that!). Ask the Waterstones staff for recommendations or go in and pick up something that has a nice cover or sounds interesting. Read things at the same time as your friends and chat about it. Be curious again. Step outside the BookTok echo chamber and, who knows, you might find a new favourite.
