In a time when screens dominate nearly every aspect of daily life, a surprising trend has taken root on one of the most fast-paced platforms of all: TikTok. Enter BookTok — a thriving subcommunity where users create short, passionate, and often emotional videos about their favorite books. What started as a niche corner of the short video social media app has evolved into a global literary movement – even being dubbed as a catalyst for the revitalization of the publishing industry, all the while transforming the way young people engage with books.
What exactly is BookTok?
BookTok is a hashtag-driven community on TikTok where readers share book reviews, reactions, recommendations, and aesthetic content centered around reading. It’s not unusual to see a user tearfully praising the ending of a novel, stacking favorite titles into themed lists, or showing off beautifully curated bookshelves. These videos are short, emotionally charged, and highly relatable — all qualities that make them incredibly effective at drawing people into new reading habits.
BookTok is a hashtag-driven community on TikTok where readers share book reviews, reactions, recommendations, and aesthetic content centered around reading.
The most popular BookTok creators and influencers have amassed hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions, of followers, and their recommendations can catapult titles — new and old — onto bestseller lists. Books like It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller found massive new audiences thanks to BookTok’s viral power last year. But beyond driving sales, BookTok is even influencing what books look like, how they’re marketed, and even how they’re written.
BookTok might shift the power dynamic in publishing
Traditionally, publishers controlled which books were spotlighted through media coverage, award campaigns, or bookstore placement. Now, a well-placed video from a BookTok creator can do more for a book’s visibility than a national review. Publishers are taking note. Some are now creating dedicated TikTok teams, designing marketing strategies around BookTok trends, and even re-releasing backlist titles with updated covers tailored to TikTok’s visual language. Authors, too, are increasingly attuned to the platform. Many engage directly with readers, while others write with a BookTok audience in mind, emphasizing emotional intensity, complex relationships, and themes like mental health, identity, and resilience that resonate deeply with the platform’s largely Gen Z audience.
On BookTok, aesthetics very much matter. Users arrange their bookshelves by color, match their current reads to their outfits, and share “shelfies” that look more like mood boards than library archives. This emphasis on visual appeal has had a direct impact on book design.
BookTok blends literary appreciation with visual culture in a fascinating way
On BookTok, aesthetics very much matter. Users arrange their bookshelves by color, match their current reads to their outfits, and share “shelfies” that look more like mood boards than library archives. This emphasis on visual appeal has had a direct impact on book design.
Publishers are responding with beautiful, collector-worthy editions, soft matte covers, foiled titles, sprayed edges, and embossed typography are now more common than ever. Book covers have become part of a reader’s personal brand—a book needs to look good on camera as well as on the page. In many cases, readers are drawn to books not just for their stories but for how they will fit into the aesthetic of their reading nook or Instagram grid.
Curated bookshelves, themed book stacks, and visually-driven “TBR-lists” (to-be-read) have all contributed to a new way of thinking about books—as cultural artifacts and design objects, not just text. The tactile and visual pleasure of a well-designed book is once again being celebrated in an era when physical media often takes a backseat to digital.
We’ve added examples of some of our favorite cool and interesting book covers below, which visually showcase this trend in action, and exemplify this marriage of storytelling and visual art.
