BookTok is Commercializing my Hobby, and I am Sick of it

“Popular, successful, widely appealing and spicy” – that was the definition popular BookTuber Jack Edwards used to explain the characteristics of a standard BookTok novel.

The first book club was founded in 1634 by Anne Hutchinson. A dozen women would gather aboard a ship on its way to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the goal of understanding the world and experiencing Biblical literature collectively. Nowadays, BookTok is the biggest book club Earth has ever seen. I wonder what Hutchinson would think of the 200 billion views #booktok has reached on TikTok – would she be proud, or apprehensive and insecure?

The distillation of a lifelong experience into a palatable 300-page novel for the common person is a modern phenomenon. Low literacy rates, low wages and low levels of production rates made books, and the act of reading, inaccessible. The UK hit a record high of 669 million physical copies sold in 2022, a number inconceivable to a pressman a mere century ago. In an article for The Guardian, Chloe Mac Donnell states that this revival of interest in physical publishing is a positive and direct result of a gen Z culture on social media, and I agree.

However, I believe BookTok promotes an aesthetic, rather than actual engagement with the text. In 2024, Kaia Gerber told British Vogue that “reading is so sexy” to advertise her book club, encouraging readers to meticulously curate what they’re reading and enjoying to illicit an intentional reaction. Amazon’s popular book cataloging website Goodreads has become a means of establishing a personal brand, whether it’s sex appeal or intellect. In other words, reading has become a performance.

TikTok normalizes the overconsumption of goods. Influencers promote their lifestyle – massive in-home libraries, time to read over a hundred books a year and ownership of multiple copies of the same book (of course I need the special edition!), while confessing to leaving dozens unread – as realistic. As if we’re on an equal playing field. Even Goodreads has a tab beneath every book labelled “Buy on Amazon CA,” incentivizing a purchase rather than a trip to your local library. Just like you don’t need all 36 formats of Taylor Swift’s "The Tortured Poets Department" album, you don’t need 10 variants of Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

Though many popular novels were published prior and without BookTok in mind – with the tag only applied in hindsight – I worry unpublished authors will feel like they need to confine their art to a set of checkboxes to reach bookstores. Author Colleen Hoover has notoriously profited off BookTok’s popular enemies-to-lovers trope and remained untouched by the criticism of her habit of romanticizing violence. In other words, it’s been a while since I’ve been surprised by something new. Not because of a lack of creativity, but because authors limit their artistry to get bills paid.

Let us read for the sake of personal interest and remind ourselves that the purchase of a novel is an investment, not a tax return.

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