Elise Hartwell is currently in Dr. Pfannenstiel’s Independent Study course. She crafted a blog post exploring book content creation on social media platforms in 2025 and the implications such content holds for society.
Bookstagram, Booktok, BookTube & the Content Within
By: Elise Hartwell
There are so many great books to choose from, with more published every day. With the rise of social media spaces, there are more ways to access book recommendations across all genres. Creators across platforms upload web content to share book reviews, announcements, and recommendations. Here, I provide information to help you navigate the three most popular social media spaces for learning about books being published in your favorite genres.
Across social media platforms, there exist different ways of communicating that serve the different interests of their users. This communication within a space is called discourse communities, which are defined as groups where people with shared goals, interests, and ways of communicating come together. This could mean keeping up with friends and family members both near and far. Staying in lockstep with strands from your favorite brands. Learning new things about whatever may interest you. Most social media users navigate messages from multiple discourse communities, within the same platform, on a daily basis. For me and many other readers, we exist in book discourse communities. Whether it means we post content or just consume it, we engage with conversations, reviews, and general love of genre conventions within our social media feeds.
Instagram is known for its photo collage style, making it simpler for people to consume. In its essence, the viewer mainly looks at the image and potentially reads the captions. When it comes to Instagram, also known as Bookstagram, I mainly view posts of visual lists. On Instagram, this also seems to be the place where more authors are directly communicating to their audience, including responding to some follower comments. It’s a place where I can keep up to date with my beloved authors and their upcoming releases, and see authors engage with their followers and build a discourse community around their version of the genre. When I discover a new author or book, content I want to appear in my feed, I just move over to the explore page and scroll until I find a book or list that interests me. Right now, Bookstagram is the space for authors to connect with their readers, to build community between author and readers.
TikTok really made headway in popularizing short-form content, usually ranging between one to three minutes, and sometimes extending all the way to ten minutes. Its book community, also known more popularly as BookTok, was made for book lovers to communicate with other book lovers about their favorite books through content like reviews and recommendations. The most popular genres on the app are primarily young adult, fantasy, and romance, but truly, there is a creator out there for everyone. These genres are tagged within BookTok to help readers find these discussions.
When it comes to finding creators in this space, the things I look for are if they read diversely, have inspired opinions around the books their talking about and not just talking about a book because it’s popular, and lastly, though not entirely book related, if they uplift others because that is something that’s important to me as a consumer of this content. The books and genres creators discuss in their videos matter when I am deciding who to follow.
YouTube’s book community seems to have predated the previously mentioned platforms. YouTube largely supports long-form content. The book space on YouTube, called BookTube, operates similarly to BookTok where the creators discuss their favorite books in the form of reviews or recommendations and reading vlogs – also similar to BookTok, BookTube is content by readers, for readers. In a sort of crossover between YouTube and TikTok, when US TikTok was originally shut down, I saw a lot of those creators begin to move on to YouTube. I feel that this digital migration started to evolve the content in the discourse community, even with some of the creators who predate TikTok, started to incorporate more discussions around the other platforms. Finding content creators on YouTube is very similar to how I operate with finding creators on TikTok. I have to like the content they produce and need to have a similar interest in the book they talk about.
Each of these spaces serves different purposes depending on what I want to get from it. The experiences you have within the space are truly what you make of it. You, as the user, have the ability to decide on the content you see. The choices I make can influence the content I receive, but I still have to make my own decisions even with that content. I can search for BookTok, but I still choose which content I interact with and which I swipe past.