The Many Contradictions of BookTok
I’ve followed the bookish internet through many iterations. I’ve been discussing books on LiveJournal, Tumblr, BookTube, and even several of my own Blogspot and WordPress book blogs for the last 20ish years, which is a century in online time. But I’ve never seen anything quite like BookTok, the bookish side of TikTok.
If you want something to drive you away from books and reading, it’s TikTok. It’s a firehose of unending entertainment, constantly changing and adapting to your whims. Why read a book that takes 350 pages to tell one story when you can watch hundreds of pieces of entertainment in an hour and get all your news, media recommendations, comedy, despair, and cleaning hacks all in one place?
It’s cliché to say that short form video is destroying our attention spans, but it’s a hard claim to argue: try watching just 15 minutes of TikTok and then trying to concentrate on a creative project directly afterwards. It’s like sprinting into a brick wall. In fact, TikTok might be as close as we have to the opposite of reading books: short form versus longform, visuals versus text, new versus old.
I genuinely believe that is true. And here’s something else I believe:
If you want something to make you fall in love with books and reading, it’s TikTok.
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