It’s a mild spring day as I retreat into the cool sanctuary of my favorite used bookstore. As I browse the fiction section on this particular morning, the musty smell of worn pages perfuming the dust-filled air, the shop’s beloved orange tabby cat, Bob Newhart, sunbathes in an old Victorian chair. I’m here today on a mission: to find Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, an enduring classic of dark academia.
What inspired me to run to my local bookstore?
One word: BookTok.
In an era where the average American only reads 12.6 books a year, BookTok, a TikTok community of bibliophiles, has been credited with rekindling the public’s interest in reading and selling millions of books. BookTok has revived the publishing industry and catapulted authors to literary superstardom. Today, the #BookTok hashtag has over 175 billion views.
What I love most about BookTok is that it introduces me to new books. Yes, some BookTokers feature the same books over and over (here’s looking at you Daisy Jones and the Six), but many expose me to little-known authors and long-forgotten literary gems. If I hadn’t scrolled through TikTok, I would have never discovered McNally Jackson books, an independent New York bookseller that aims to publish books off the beaten path. It was only because I saw a McNally’s post on BookTok that I discovered Goodbye People, a Gatsby-esque novel of decadence in 1960s Los Angeles.
The BookTokers I most appreciate use their platform to recognize deserving authors and promote diverse voices. One of my favorite BookTokers, UK-based NicoleReads98, specializes in horror and literary fiction. Though she speaks to over 56.3K followers, her page has the casual chattiness of a conversation between friends. Nicole has the aura of a punk librarian. Unlike some mainstream book influencers, she doesn’t feature the same ten overexposed titles over and over again.
Many BookTokers specialize in the obvious (“Want a mystery? Read The Da Vinci Code!”). But Nicole’s recommendations are endearingly eccentric. In one series, “If You Want to Read About ___, Read This,” Nicole recommends books for seemingly every situation from when you want to read something that keeps you up at night to when you want a cozy read for a rainy Sunday in bed.
Before the rise of the social media mammoth, I learned about books in a more traditional fashion: I read the New York Times notable book list and browsed the bookstore’s staff picks section. I picked up titles deemed noteworthy by critics; I bought any book raved as a “masterpiece” or “tour de force.” I read books whose covers were prominently displayed in bookstores.
But on BookTok, I’m exposed to the random, the unknown, the obscure. Without BookTok, I wouldn’t have the joy of discovering such quirky/weird/eclectic/hyper-specific book recommendations as books to accompany Lana Del Rey’s latest album, Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard.
Still, there’s a lot wrong with BookTok.
Many claim the short form of the platform (most videos are less than 60 seconds) reduces books to empty-headed buzzwords and vapid descriptions (i.e. sad girl books, hot girl books, books featuring unhinged female narrators). 20th century media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously asserted,“The medium is the message.” The medium of TikTok is almost incomprehensibly accelerated: the average length of small account videos is 38.3 seconds. What’s the message of a medium that condenses complex texts like A Secret History into a series of formulaic tropes and short, easily digestible bits of information? I can’t help but think the answer is rather dystopic.
Worse still is BookTok’s emphasis on quantity over quality. The platform is preoccupied with calculating how many pages/books you read in a day/week/month/year. Most Booktokers boast absurdly high reading stats (at a certain point, you start to wonder: do any of these people have normal 9-to-5 careers?). In one video, content creator Jack Edwards shares he read 23 books in the first month of 2023 alone.
BookTok is a microcosm of our achievement-obsessed culture. What matters isn’t finding joy in a graceful sentence or recognizing yourself in a character across centuries and cultures—what matters is how many pages you’ve turned. On BookTok, reading is a race with winners and losers. In its disturbing vision, reading more makes you more of a reader.
For most of my life, I’ve been proud to say I read 50 books a year…that is until I discovered BookTok. While I averaged a solid 4-5 books a month, many BookTok influencers read nearly four times as much. On BookTok, it’s not uncommon for rabid readers to devour upwards of 200 books a year.
Suddenly reading my measly 50 books wasn’t good enough. So last year, I aimed to read at least 75 books (roughly 6-7 books a month). When champagne and confetti rang in 2024, I was happy to say I had surpassed my ambitious goal and read 83 books.
Do I regret forcing myself to read more?
Yes and no. On one hand, setting a concrete goal made me more devoted to reading every night, not to mention inspired me to read in way more genres.
But is something lost when we focus too intently on an end goal?
In my quest to finish 75 books, I became more extrinsically motivated when it came to reading: rather than savor each sentence, I obsessively tallied how many pages I read. I found immense, almost impossible joy from checking books off my ever-expanding to read list. I tracked the number of books I read like I monitored my daily number of steps.
In my goal to read more, reading become a duty-shackled job, a burdensome chore, a mere means to an end. Sitting down with a book was no longer a relaxing retreat—it was another pressure-filled responsibility. I had to read. If I didn’t read for at least 1 uninterrupted hour a night, I felt guilty.
On BookTok, the focus is finishing books—not taking pleasure in reading itself. Much of the platform is concerned with reaching reading “quotas.” Countless videos offer advice for reading more: Listen to audiobooks on 1.5 speed! Skim long passages of texts! Read novellas and graphic novels to hit your reading goals faster!
“More! More! More!” “Faster, faster, faster!” BookTok screams like a boss at his assembly line of factory workers. But don’t books invite us to do the exact opposite: to slow down, to sit, to savor?
What’s lost when we read faster?
Comedian Woody Allen once joked that after he took a speed reading course, he read Tolstoy’s colossal masterpiece War and Peace in 20 minutes. When asked what it was about, he could only reply, “It involved Russia.”
Though Allen’s story might be an exaggeration, the lesson is clear: we comprehend less when we read faster. In 2023, I might have read more but I retained very little.
In many ways, BookTok is antithetical to reading. Reading teaches us to think deeply; BookTok encourages us to skim the surface. While reading requires sustained attention, BookTok conditions us to swipe to the next video if one doesn’t capture our attention in the first 5 seconds. Reading asks us to puzzle, to ponder, to occasionally suffer long passages of description. BookTok offers a never-ending dopamine-fueled flood of entertainment.
Consumerism is yet another problem with the platform. Like #FashionTok, BookTok has been corrupted by commercialization. Much of this literary corner of the internet is a spectacle of conspicuous consumption. Rather than focus on the joys of losing yourself in a book, many BookTok videos feature massive book hauls (a more literary-leaning form of consumerism, but consumerism nonetheless). It’s not uncommon for BookTokers to post hauls of ten, even twenty, brand new hard covers (which at a less-than-cheap $24.99 each can total up to $500). Though these videos don’t seem as unforgivably wasteful as $1,000 Shein hauls, they reduce books into commodities to be bought and sold. On BookTok, being a reader means participating in the market system: buying an excessive number of books, curating a colossal personal library, spending extravagantly at Barnes & Noble. It’s buying books—not reading them—that makes you a reader on BookTok.
I know after I scroll through the social media platform, I find myself more concerned with the acquisition of books. I used to only borrow books from the library—now my bookshelves are so overstuffed that I have several Pinterest-worthy towers of volumes stacked on the ground. Not only do I buy more books, but I’m more focused on the aesthetics of reading, not the reading itself: the darling bookmarks, the pretty covers, the perfectly coordinated sticky notes. I buy books with an eye for how they’ll look on my bookshelf.
In his scathing article “In the Shallow World of BookTok, Being a Reader is More Important Than Reading,” former Book Tuber Barry Pierce criticizes the platform’s emphasis on performance. According to Pierce, many BookTokers are more concerned with acting like readers than actually reading. Reading is no longer a leisurely pastime undertaken in the privacy of your home— it’s a play you stage for your thousands of BookTok followers. Our intellectual endeavors now have to be Instagrammable. We can’t simply read in ratty sweatpants in a half made bed— our social media has to be an aesthetic art gallery of visually appealing Penguin classics, chamomile tea in antique floral cups and romantic white nightgowns.
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When I finally find A Secret History at my local bookshop, I’m enamored of the cover. I love the elegant font, the close up of a classical statue. Tartt’s cover evokes a New England college campus in crisp, crimson-covered autumn. When I take it to the checkout counter, I imagine how I’ll look reading it in a plaid skirt and cable knit sweater.
Is this ultimately what BookTok has done: taught us to regard books as fashion accessories instead of works of literature?
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