At the last book fair in Turin, the Sellerio stand was besieged by girls and boys looking for the book with “James Dean on the cover”: A life like many others by Hanya Yanagihara, published in Italy in 2016, was sold out in a short time. The cover image, which doesn’t actually depict James Dean, has bounced more and more frequently on social media over the years. In the United States, #BookTok signs appeared on the tables of Barnes & Noble alongside the books recommended on TikTok. Amazon has opened the section called “Internet Famous” on its site, with lists of titles that anyone who has spent time on the social network would recognize.
Spies of a phenomenon called BookTok. Powered by videos posted on the social TikTok as very young readers, it is revolutionizing the publishing market. Awakening the sale of books, even not recently published, such as Lto the song of Achilles, reinterpretation of Homer’s Iliad by Madeline Miller (Marsilius).
Mobile phones and social media accused of removing children from reading therefore bring the children back into the bookstores. What is happening? “Teenagers look for stories in which to tell each other and in which to meet again. The doubt that can come to us adults is that the ones we tell them are poor. They are telling us that the need for the story is still alive. We imagine them interested in other things, in objects like shoes and clothes, but what’s going on makes us understand that they’re actually interested in the story behind the object, the story behind the cover, “he says Gianluca Daffi, Professor of Psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan and Brescia.
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Tiktok-goers follow the reading advice of their peers more than a teacher or parent. So much so as to boost sales of some books, just as Chiara Ferragni’s Instagram posts visiting the Uffizi had increased the income of a weekend by 24%. Has the perception of authority changed? “I would not put it on this level. The channels through which information is sought have changed. But it is completely normal. Teenagers rely on horizontal rather than vertical channels, they ask a friend for reading advice, not a father or a grandfather . There is always a confrontation with peers “. Even emulation on social networks, explains the expert, is nothing new: the Internet, the network, is the “big group”.
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It is a question of content but also of language. Which has changed instead. The guys on TikTok post videos of books full of bookmarks browsed quickly, reviews of a few seconds entrusted to words and stars, photos of covers of five volumes that make you cry. Very short videos, 15 or 60 seconds, which around the hashtag #BookTok today reach more than 24 billion views. “If an adult needs a written review or a presentation to choose a book, in any case a verbal style, a child relies on a more visual and rapid, more concise and effective way. Once we talked about cognitive styles, everyone has one and they change over time “, explains the teacher.
But if the style is different, the substance is not. BookTok, concludes the expert, is not an unexpected or new phenomenon. At the base there is the need to tell about the boys to feel part of something. Tiktok is a medium, the protagonist is the book, the culture that is alive and spinning. “It doesn’t matter that the kids don’t read the book, in the meantime they went into a bookshop and bought it if they find it at home. Maybe at the disposal of parents who will read it. Culture is also this, culture turns”.
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