It Was Always Stupid: BookTok and The Publishing Industry

Aside from a rebrand, the books being put out by publishers aren't very different compared to 50 years ago

(This is part of an ongoing series I hope to start about how seemingly modern phenomena have much more historical precedent than you might realize)

‘BookTok’ is a term that is used to describe a community of TikTok users who use the platform to find books (primarily YA fiction and/or romance) to read and authors that cater to them. It’s a phenomenon that’s rare, but not unprecedented, because it manages to unite fans of a genre, instead of just a certain author, into a marketable group. But once these readers and authors are brought together under a name in the collective consciousness, that name has much more social gravity than the sum of its parts.

Because of its size and online nature, BookTok is an excellent stand in for a lot of different grievances about modern society. The choking presence of fandom, the dumbing down of society, the over-commercialization of literature as a whole. It all seems like a degeneration of all the culture worth preserving, like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, or Leno returning to The Tonight Show.