Why it is good to see Edinburgh Book Festival embracing the BookTok generation
BookTok has become a mainstay of bookshops across the country - and it is bringing a love of reading to a new generation.
I spent Friday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival, something that has become a near annual tradition ever since I went on trips with my school library as a child.
No trip to the book festival is complete without a trip to the bookshop tent. This year there is a section for popular BookTok books, something that is becoming a familiar sight in bookshops up and down the country.
BookTok started off as a subcommunity on TikTok, but more recently it has become shorthand for all social media content dedicated to books and reading.
There has been an explosion in people’s love for books since the pandemic. There are many reasons for this, but BookTok is one. A poll by The Publisher’s Association found that 59 per cent of 16 to 25 year olds found a passion for reading thanks to BookTok. Forbes says #BooKTok has accumulated over 370 billion views.
It is not without its critics. There are some who argue this is the end of ‘proper’ literature, as authors and publishers are sacrificing originality and creativity for the sake of online marketability.
This is true to a certain extent. There is a diminishing level of quality in some of the literature produced to help fuel the never-ending desire of the BookTok community.
I have certainly read a fair number of BookTok books over the past year (that I have thoroughly enjoyed) that have been badly edited with spelling and grammatical errors. There are others where printing quality has fallen short of the mark because of speed.
But this is no reason to deride the readers - this is on the publishing companies who need to remember to think about quality rather than solely on profit.
It is also a rather simplistic view to assume all BookTok books are anti-intellectual and not as good as ‘real’ books.
Let’s take The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller as an example (one of my favourite books) - it is a reimagining of The Iliad and one of the most popular BookTok books. The author spent around a decade writing the book, has a masters degree in classics and teaches Latin and Greek, and now hundreds of thousands of people are reading about ancient Greece thanks to social media.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has seen a spike in popularity thanks to BookTok, despite being published 200 years ago. Readers can hardly be criticised for indulging in this just because they were inspired by an influencer online.
I understand not all BookTok books are like this. Many are romance books that are written like a popular trope checklist, published at rapid speed and even copying cover designs of other popular books to hit a certain audience.
Some bookshops wrongly assume these trope-heavy, quick-read romances are all BookTok is, and therefore fill their BookTok section accordingly. But there is so much more to BookTok in reality and it is an unfortunate symptom of the somewhat misogynistic view of the kind of readers on these platforms.
Personally, it is great to see Edinburgh Book Festival embracing BookTok. It is bringing a love of reading to a new generation and that, whether it is a literary classic or a pop romance, should be celebrated.
After all it was Jane Austen, one of the most popular BookTok authors, who said: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”
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