As you can imagine every hobby that is practiced by younger generations ends up having an online counterpart or at the very least an online community. The community of bookworms and those who love to read is no different. This is why more and more we’re seeing a lot of online communities centred around these interests crop up on different platforms. One such platform is Instagram. But what is exactly the rising trend that accompanies this interest in what many participants have started to call Bookstagram? Let’s dive into it and figure out where it comes from and what exactly it means for both the platform and the hobby of reading.
To many people, Instagram is a platform that is used primarily as a tool to follow your favorite celebrities or just the general marketplace where you can buy fantasy candles and healing crystals. The reality though is that it is much more than that. When you think of Instagram as a social media platform it’s important to understand that it does not exist isolated from other platforms. Many people use Instagram to link their accounts back to their Twitter as well as their TikTok accounts. While to many people this might seem insignificant the reality is that the connection between TikTok as well as Instagram is essential to understand the phenomenon behind bookstagram.
In fact, before Bookstagram, there was a community online that was called Booktok. How the community’s name implies this was of course a community of bookworms on TikTok. Concretely we were seeing a lot of content creators make tick talks about upcoming books or writers that they like which means that often you could see content about both new and older titles that might have missed enticing the younger generations into reading them. While many people consider these younger generations making this type of content somewhat silly the reality is that this serves as an incredibly powerful vector for young readers to discover writers that might have been too old for their generation to notice. Well-established things that we take for granted like Stephen King for example might have not been able to reach much younger readers if it wasn’t for these types of promotional endeavors on these platforms.
Many of those booktokers of course have Instagram accounts which means that they are crossposting between both platforms. The effect that this had though is that while many TikTok followers would go to their Instagram to get their fix of their favorite content creators many people who only browse Instagram then discovered these creators and this type of content on Instagram. This means that now you have Instagram-exclusive content creators who make book-related content while often being inspired by TikTok creators themselves. The reason why this is so amazing for the book industry is that it creates a whole new platform for new authors and book distributors to be able to market up-and-coming writers. This is why many booktokers have been able to secure sponsorships where they can promote books directly and provide their viewers with the link driving traffic to those books and increasing sales. This is a dream come true for many authors.
This has a very positive impact on the platforms as well since one of the most crucial aspects of content creation and content consumption as a viewer is that if you like something you want more of it. This means that if you are somebody who entered this community through Instagram you will be pushed to look to Tiktok to find other content creators that appeal to your interest. If on the contrary, you are somebody who only uses TikTok knowing that your favorite creators are present on Instagram and that there are other content creators also making content for your hobby on this platform will drive you to create an account and check out Instagram more often. This cross-pollination between platforms allows for a more diverse and sizable community that can share different experiences and different types of media to fuel the cultural impact of this community and this hobby. So, whether it is funny memes, clever sketches, or even great book recommendations the online presence of this community has profoundly changed the face of the reading hobby online.
