BookTok took reading from a hobby viewed as nerdy, homework-like and boring, to an activity that is increasingly diffused and appreciated among youngsters. It helped many people rediscover their love for books after years of inactivity, connected readers from all around the world, gave a new way for new and old authors to promote their works and aided in an increase of book sales — the sales in the American adult fiction genre in 2022 went up 8.5% from 2021. Nowadays, it is possible to find a BookTok section in the majority of bookstores.
As the enormous community of book lovers continues to grow, its advantages, especially in what refers to teenagers, become more and more clear. Living in a reality in which the use of screens and the internet is pretty much indispensable, the benefits of reading, such as stress reduction, focus and memory improvement, and vocabulary and knowledge expansion, are more important to developing minds than they have ever been. Looking at the bigger picture, it seems like BookTok is one of the best things to have come out of social media in the past few years.
However, if we know where to look, it is evident that not everything is a bed of roses. Despite its pivotal contribution to the encouragement of reading, which will hardly ever not be important and relevant, the question of whether BookTok has been doing more harm than good in some aspects is crucial to guarantee the dignity of both users exposed to this type of content and literature itself.
Social media has promoted a certain standardization of literature, and this seems to have impacted people’s ability to read and reflect on what they read critically. The quality and content presented are usually lazy, common, even fanfiction-like, and plots are extremely similar.
The further we dig, the more absurd it becomes: the search for stories with sexual content has been very prominent, with some readers being guided by the criteria that if there is no porn, they will not read it; furthermore, topics approached by authors have also become extremely dark, if not illicit; an excellent example is “Haunting Adeline,” by H. D. Carlton, which has helped normalize and worse, romanticize, topics like crime and abuse.
That is the media many children and teens are being exposed to, instead of age-appropriate books. A recent incident involving “Icebreaker,” a novel by Hannah Grace, caused furor among parents of elementary-schoolers, and it reveals another aspect of homogenization in the book industry: cover design. Cute, cartoon-like illustrations are one of the most popular kinds between readers, therefore having the highest numbers of sales; but the sometimes even childish covers frequently hide very mature and explicit writing in between their books’ pages.
Grace’s novel misled various parents and children, exposing them to scenes no one should have to read at such a young age, but it was not the first one and certainly will not be the last.
These books are the ones applauded by readers, integrated in a strange hive mind mentality that attacks anyone that shows the smallest sign of criticism upon the protected works. They do want you to talk about them — they do it themselves — but you will surely be massacrated if you dare to deem a book bad or low quality, since many writers and even characters are treated as if they were celebrities, untouchable gods that must not be condemned under any circumstances.
A possible cause of this phenomenon is the fact that many new readers were introduced to literature by books that led them further into the BookTok rabbit hole of recommendations, not getting in contact with what are considered (by a common global opinion) “good” works. With authors publishing numerous books a year, all getting praise for fitting into BookTok standards despite being essentially the same, the question that lingers is: doesn’t limiting yourself to such a tiny branch of literature cut back on some developments that being an avid reader brings? It looks as though it is the assassination of media literacy, of interpretation, of heated debates upon what things mean.
BookTok readers need to understand that a book is a work of art: it is meant to be torn apart and be put back together, to be analyzed, praised and criticized, to evoke all sorts of different views and opinions. They must go beyond the walls built by hundreds of books that look, sound, are all the same; only when they open their eyes to everything that exists beyond BookTok and learn to differentiate good, well-written literature from bad literature will we be able to put an end to the promotion of all mind-numbing, inappropriate, deceptive books out there. So many incredible authors have and continue to publish true unique masterpieces; it is just a matter of coming across them.
