The Reading Boom Explodes on Social Media

A very common phrase, I daresay transversal in social and cultural conversations, is “today's youth no longer read, they are always in front of their smartphone screen”. This statement also has some truth to it. But, apparently, precisely from social media, a reversal of this trend seems to be emerging, thanks to the phenomenon known as “BookTok”.

In fact, BookTok hasn't invented anything new. In short, it consists of 30-second TikTok videos where users talk about a book, recommending its purchase and reading through the emotions the volume has evoked in them. Does that remind you of something? Exactly. It's nothing more than a way to do reviews and word-of-mouth marketing, in a simple, effective, and captivating way for TikTok users. A restyling that apparently works, if we analyze the numbers:

1. the hashtag #booktok has been used 73.5 million times worldwide to date;
2. in Italy alone, #booktokitalia features well over a million pieces of content.

An astounding result, considering the average age of the platform's users, namely young people aged 14 to 30, who are, according to common opinion, the generations least accustomed to reading.

But how is it possible that such a fast, immediate consumption medium acts as a driver for an activity that – on the contrary – needs its time, slowness, and a particularly focused attention span? By leveraging emotions, a language that “hits” immediately and reaches where concepts often stop. If the reviewer is good at expressing in a handful of seconds the emotions the book aroused in them, the video has the chance to go viral and reach a very large audience. There are three key elements that have, in fact, decreed the phenomenon's success, making it viral:

1. Immediate emotion: videos work because they convey authentic emotion;
2. Identification and loyalty: users see themselves in and trust creators similar to them;
3. FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out): an expression indicating the fear of "missing out" on something everyone is talking about, leveraging the individual need to be part of something that "qualifies" them socially.

To recap, #booktok works because it combines the desire to identify with the followed creator with the pleasure of sharing an emotion with other "like-minded" users.

Benefiting from this phenomenon – besides publishers, who are following it very closely – is primarily genre literature and some specific subgenres, namely fantasy, romance, and their fusion, “romantasy,” a hybrid that seems to be highly successful in gaining the approval of Millennials and Gen Z. This success then manages to transcend the social network community and reach bookstores: the best-selling book in Italy in 2022, “The Tearsmith” by Erin Doom, exploded precisely thanks to BookTok.

Beyond genre preferences, the phenomenon holds a disruptive cultural significance if it allows a social network, whose fundamental characteristics are immediacy and brevity, to direct the curiosity and literary interest of young masses towards reading. It certainly represents an ethical facet in the common use of the platform which, at least in part, redefines the values conveyed through its use. On the other hand, there is also the other side of the coin, because one must not forget that social media are still governed by algorithms, with the risk that only certain titles and genres become viral at the expense of others, leading to a consequent homogenization of public tastes.

Social network users know well that what works today might already be "old" tomorrow. How can this hyper-speed of the medium reconcile with a decidedly slower practice like reading? Is #booktok just a passing interest or is it the right way to introduce young generations to literature? The answer to these questions might lie behind a change in perspective. If there is a fear, often well-founded, that young people read much less than previous generations, perhaps the focus should not be on why or on j'accuse against other "distracting" agents, but on the current paths through which teenagers and young adults discover books—paths that align with their daily interests and speak their language. In this sense, #booktok has the opportunity to create a truly new generation of passionate digital readers, while simultaneously transforming creators into new digital cultural mediators, with great power: the ability to stimulate – with their viral posts – curiosity, interest, and thus the enjoyment not only of genre literature but also of other, more challenging types of reading, which can in the medium-to-long term further impact the formation and thought of young people, in the hoped-for perspective of a renewed – and perhaps “futuristically enlightened” – social “spring”.