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Paulina Ortiz

Judith R. McCann

English 1301-129

20 September 2022

BookTok

BookTok: A community of readers worldwide that interact through TikTok

TikTok has become a largely used platform around the globe. Many go home after a long

day at work or school, lay lie down, and open TikTok. Memes, news, drama, and other forms of

entertainment are available at the tap of a finger. Booktok is a community that has a large mass

of viewers. Just by searching up the hashtag, it shows that it is just shy of having eighty-million

views. It is a medium that allows people to come together due to one common interest - books.

Using TikTok, readers in BookTok can communicate with other readers, and recommend and

review books, yet there is a problem with romanticizing books with dark themes.

Nowadays, reading has become a thing of the past. Most kids spend their time playing

video games or on their phones on social media, so it has become a little weird to spend any free

time reading instead of in front of a screen. If someone does read, most times the reader cannot

go to their friends to talk about what they read. Some people are lucky enough to have someone

they share that interest with, but most are not aren’t. This is where BookTok comes into play.

Readers can go to any video and open the comment section to find people talking about the book

that the video is about. The thread shown below is an example of it.

The topic of the video was the male leads from The Made Series by Danielle Lori.
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“I’m sorry but I didn’t like the brothers as much as Nico. Nico’s the blueprint period. I

like Christian but Ronan was doing too much.”- (simplybliss).

“THIS!! The 2nd book is okay for me, the 3rd one.. I’m not sure if I want to finish it.

Ronan is tooo toxic.”- (louelleeee).

“I’m so glad you agree because people are blowing smoke up about Ronan and I'm like?

He’s so toxic I can’t. I finished the book but I definitely like Nicos the best.”-(simplybliss).

“Lol yeah. I had this book for a while but I just started reading it because I was taking a

break from Mafia romances but urghhh, he’s too cruel. Nico is the least problematic of the

three.”- (louelleeee).

And so on

The thread demonstrates how one single book can bring people together. Here, there were

only two participants, but there are others where many people are giving their input and what

they think. But that’s that is not all though, there are many other ways that people can interact

through BookTok.

Not only can someone discuss a book with other readers, but they can also recommend

and review books in the comments. There are Multiple videos in the community that rate and

mention parts that stood out to them in the book. For example, a video comes up on the for you

page that is reviewing the book “The Spanish Love Deception” by Elena Armas. The person in
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the video is talking about what was going through their mind while reading the book and after

too. Whether it was an enjoyable book and what parts they loved and hated. Usually, somewhere

in the video, a rating is given. In this case, the reviewer is saying that it is a mediocre book. Very

cliche and not that original, yet still cutesy with enough tension-filled scenes to last someone a

lifetime. After all Of that, the rating that is given is a six and a half. When the comments are

opened, some people do agree with the review. To them, the book is mediocre but still a cutesy

romance. If the book is loved all around the community and people are asking for

recommendations that resemble the book, there are some lists that can be found in the comments

section alone. There are also videos made on that topic. In the end, though, everyone has

different opinions and tastes. Some people may find a book cringe and cliche while others find it

cute and romantic. Only the reader can be the judge of what they read especially if books have

dark themes that can trigger people(@1fvrah).

Many books include potentially harmful themes that can be triggers for some people. In

BookTok these books are recommended and the video maker adds a warning, but the problem is

that when a certain scene or situation is described from the book, it seems romantic in a way. For

example, there is a video that was recommending the book “It Ends With Us”. The protagonist of

the book was being abused by her husband and did not leave him until one of the male leads

convinced her to leave her husband. The video made it seem as if she would not have left him

without the male’s help. In the end, what people understood from the video was that if not for

that situation and reuniting with her love again, she probably would have never left her husband.

This form of promotion for a book is not very empowering, yet it has become so normalized that

people do not even see the wrongness of it. The people in the community have been desensitized

and do not even think twice about the situation or how these types of scenarios actually occur in
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real life. Instead, they also see it as romantic when some books are not meant to be seen as that.

They are supposed to be raw and real and bring attention to things happening around the

world(@liteouswrites).

Books are like their own language. People who read them get each other, and people

who do not, do not. They are meant to bring people who have a common interest together and

BookTok helps with that. It gives people a judge-free space to discuss books and connect, but

there are some dark sides to it. Despite all of that, TikTok is a genre that brings people together

using many communities and it just so happens that BookTok is one of those too.
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Works Cited

Eden Reid [@edenreidreads]. “Still gave it a 4 stars though #booktok #bookreview

#thespanishlovedeception #romancebookrecs.” TikTok, 2022,

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRaLqvSH/

Farah [@1fvrah]. “The maddest obsession is already downloaded to my kindle #booktok

#bookclub #bookobsessed #bookishthoughts #thesweetestoblivion #nicorusso” TikTok,

2020,

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRab2ov4/

[@liteouswrites]. “ it ends with us by colleen hoover” TikTok, 2022,

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRabkMV5/