Is ‘BookTok’ the Savior of Literature?

Edward Holly (CAS ’25) inherited his love of reading from his mother, who passed down the novels from her book club to him. 

Holly now helps run Lattes and Lit, an on-campus book club at Georgetown University, which he credits for helping revitalize his interest in simply reading for pleasure. 

Still, Holly has found it more difficult to stay focused on his love of reading with the advent of social media and an increased workload.

“I think there’s so many things people are exposed to through short-form content, but I think getting away from that mindset and being able to sit down and focus on one thing for a long period of time is really good for your brain, really good for you in general,” Holly told The Hoya. 

Articles regarding the degrading literary landscape of modern times abound. A viral November 2024 article in The Atlantic titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” “exposed” the supposed myriad of Ivy League students who have never read a full book in their entire lives. The article’s popularity reflects a growing cultural consensus: Reading is the fixture of a bygone era. After all, how could books possibly compete with the rise of smartphones, laptops and other attention-span-shortening devices? 

The numbers agree: In its most recent annual report, the National Literacy Institute, an organization that collaborates with teachers to support students in learning reading skills, found that 54% of adults in the United States have literacy at or below a sixth-grade level, or the reading level of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” Furthermore, the study found that only 79% of the population qualifies as literate, a statistic that lags behind the literacy rate in most other developed nations.

However, one popular side of social media is combining short-form videos with literature, which has rekindled many people’s passion for reading.

If you’ve walked into Barnes & Noble, heard the name Sarah J. Maas or encountered the term “romantasy” in the past few years, you may be familiar with “BookTok.” This social media hashtag, which gained popularity on TikTok in March 2020, has inspired over 40 million videos and reached roughly 21.9 billion views. Online BookTok creators across platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube share content ranging from reviews of recent reads to bookstore hauls to listicles of their most anticipated titles of the year. 

Beth Marhanka, a librarian at Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library who helps facilitate Lattes and Lit, said she sees BookTok impacting the literary landscape for the better. 

“It’s wonderful to see a new generation of readers just doing so much reading,” Marhanka told The Hoya. “Gen Z is just absolutely taking full advantage of BookTok.” 

These videos have not only created a new wave of literary buzz within the digital world but have seemingly gone beyond the social media space to truly touch the larger landscape of literature.

Lizzy Mason, an author and publicity director for Entangled Publishing, a boutique publishing company for romance novels, said BookTok can highlight previously unknown authors. Entangled Publishing’s most popular title, “Fourth Wing” by Rebecca Yarros, a romance-fantasy that has sold over two million copies, became famous through BookTok.

“I think it’s given a lot of life to books that were under the radar for a long time,” Mason told The Hoya. “The thing that has made it blow up so much has been TikTok, largely.”

“Having the influencers, the huge amount of influencers, who are talking about books on BookTok is not something that we’ve ever experienced in the publishing industry,” Mason added.

 

The Launch of a Community 

The sheer diversity of creators and perspectives on BookTok allows almost any user to find a topic, creator or book that resonates with them. 

Cody Vest, an English literature teacher turned BookTok creator who reviews and recommends books to an audience of 80,000 TikTok followers, said finding a community of similar readers has been an incredibly positive and rewarding experience. 

“I’ve had so many amazing comments from people who are like, ‘I don’t find people who read stuff like I do,’” Vest told The Hoya. “When I’m recommending a book, they’ll be like, ‘I trust your taste. I’ll read this.’ It’s just been nice finding people and helping other people.”

Holly said any opportunity to bring readers together is a positive force. 

“I think the general idea of BookTok and people sharing what they read, sharing their passions is a net positive,” Holly said. “The more people that are exposed to different kinds of reading, different authors, different culture things is a really good thing. And that’s what social media should be for: creating communities around shared interests.” 

Ex-readers are also reviving their love for books through BookTok’s wide variety of recommendations. 

Jennifer Patterson, a BookTok creator with around 23,000 followers, said she directly sees the influence of her videos on her audience, sharing an anecdote of one of her followers. 

“She said, ‘I have not read in years, and I read five of your recommendations back to back to back, and now I remember how much I love reading it. These were great books,’” Patterson told The Hoya.

Longtime book lovers are also finding a home on BooksTok. 

“I started posting stuff — reviews about books that I loved — and started connecting with people. It’s been really great,” Patterson said. “That’s been the most surprising part, for me, has been the genuine connections you make with people.”

Vest also found a community within BookTok. He first gained popularity on the platform by posting videos discussing the trials of teaching but quickly felt overwhelmed by negative comments. 

Vest said transitioning to literature content in March 2024 led him to a much more positive community — along with tangible success. 

“There’s a creator rewards program, and I’ve been making decent money there as well as through brand sponsorships,” Vest said. “This is what I’m really most passionate about — reading and books and talking about it. So it just feels like a hobby to me that I can actually make money off of now.”

A New Marketing Landscape

Some publishers are shifting their marketing efforts to the world of influencers and social media in response to the success of books like “Fourth Wing.” Now, their goal is to appeal not to industry professionals but directly to online audiences. 

“We used to focus a lot on what we call gatekeepers: booksellers, librarians, teachers, parents, etc., the people who are basically recommending the books, the people that are making sure new books are put on shelves, whereas now we’re able to go much more directly to the consumer,” Mason said. “It’s a much more effective way of marketing because we don’t have to sell to somebody who’s been selling to somebody else. We’re just selling to the influencer who is then going to do the selling for us.”

A Statista survey of U.S. adults’ reading habits over the years 2019 to 2021 showed an overall uptick in reading — corresponding with the rise of BookTok. For 18- to 29-year-olds, reading rates increased from 81% to 83%, the 30-to-49 age range went from 72% to 77% and 50-to-64 jumped from 67% to 72%. According to another Statista report, the number of independent bookstores in the United States rose from 1,651 locations in 2009 to 2,599 locations in 2023. 

Georgetown is home to a lively bookstore scene, with students frequenting independent bookstores like Bridge Street Books and the Lantern Bookshop or chain Barnes & Noble just a few blocks from the university’s front gates. 

Rod Smith, the manager of Bridge Street Books, said BookTok led people in droves to his store during the COVID-19 pandemic as the platform popularized several novels.

“I’d say it wasn’t on our radar that much until around the pandemic,” Smith told The Hoya. “And then we saw waves of people asking for the same things.”

Smith noted that the platform has also removed the stigma around buying novels previously seen as “trashy,” a label often given to genres like romance, fantasy or young adult drama.

“My sense is that it is helping independent bookstores, which is a good thing,” Smith said. “I feel like just because you read one thing that’s ‘trashy’ doesn’t mean that everything you read is trashy.”

Amanda Nguyen, an employee at Bridge Street Books, said BookTok has attracted even more interest in critically acclaimed books like Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” catapulted little-known books like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends with Us” to stardom and captured a new generation’s interest in classic authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky and J.D. Salinger.

Nguyen said she pays attention to BookTok trends to stay on top of readers’ ever-changing preferences. 

“When someone comes in with a book that I’ve seen blow up recently, I do recognize it as something that is probably popular and that we should order more of,” Nguyen said. “But it comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. We could order five copies of a book and then suddenly it dies down again.” 

 

Changing the Culture of Reading

However, some in the book industry view the rise of BookTok as a negative force within the reading world that leads people to simply follow trends rather than seek out literature on their own. 

Chris Clark, a bookseller at Virginia Highland Books, an independent bookstore in Atlanta, said readers should be cautious of becoming enveloped in others’ opinions. 

“I feel like people don’t have their own opinions anymore,” Clark told The Hoya. “I feel like things will come up online and trends develop, and then people — especially people who aren’t educated — look at TikTok and think, ‘Oh, TikTok has an opinion, and now I have the opinion,’ and that’s not based on nuance or accuracy. BookTok offers you no agency.” 

Patterson has also struggled with BookTok’s seeming favoritism toward content focused on drama or opinion rather than the open discussion and recommendations-style content she prefers. 

“It seems like the more negative you are, the more you get pushed,” Patterson said. “That’s just not really where I’m at. So I had to be okay with that and comfortable with just being who I am and doing what I like.” 

Others feel that BookTok encourages users to only access books through buying, rather than getting them from libraries or other more sustainable options.

Marhanka said students should engage more with libraries before turning to bookstores or other book-buying options. 

“There are so many resources that people should know more about,” Marhanka said. “We can get access to books from all over the world through interlibrary loans so that really should be where people start if you need something, especially if you’re doing research.”

Despite these criticisms, BookTok’s influence also extends to academic study, morphing from online trends of literary development, division and discussion to influencing academia. 

Nathan Hensley, an English professor at Georgetown, said BookTok provides connections between the academic study of literature and reflects a new and important development in the literary world. 

Hensley said students in his Fall 2023 course “Novel and Modern Life” had the opportunity to bring the rigor of an English class to a genre that is generally not associated with academia. 

“Their experience of seeing academia from the student side was that there was a kind of firewall between academic understandings of literature and the kind of lived practices of it on the street,” Hensley told The Hoya. 

Hensley said the definition of literature and the canon of the subject can no longer be contained to regulated academic spaces because of expanding online platforms. 

“If we’re serious about studying culture, we better know what culture is,” Hensley said. “It’s a space of cultural innovation among people who care about culture and literature in whatever way that they’re caring about it.”

“I think it’s gorgeous to see individual people at the level of their lived experience, making new forms and sharing things with each other that are not being told to them by figures of authority,” Hensley added. 

Beyond changes in publishing and marketing, Vest said BookTok excites people about reading again. 

“It obviously resonates with a lot of people for a reason, and it’s getting people back into reading, which I think is amazing,” Vest said. “The point of BookTok is finding people who are reading books and discovering more books you like. It almost feels like it’s trendy to read again.”