Books are .epubs, .mp3s, and .mp4s, too

In 2021, literary content creator Morgan Book posted a video about books that BookTok had “lied” to her about—popular titles she personally didn’t enjoy. The mild controversy made the video take off, and she pivoted from decorating cakes at her parents’ Dairy Queen to making content about reading. That pivot is a useful entry point into a much larger question: in an era of phones, vertical dramas, and endless screen time, is there still a future for reading? And if so, what does that future look like?

What BookTok actually is

BookTok is not just a hashtag for people who like books. It’s a structured, self-sustaining online community with distinct pockets. Morgan describes it as “an online community of readers,” but that undersells the complexity. There are people giving recommendations, people making reading vlogs, authors promoting books with small marketing budgets, and whole sub-communities organized around specific genres. What makes it unusual in social media culture is how often the entire community converges on the same book at the same time—especially in romance and romantasy. Morgan points to titles like Throne of Glass, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Fourth Wing as examples. These books are “relatively intro friendly”—not high fantasy with steep learning curves—which makes them accessible to new readers. The predictability of romance, often dismissed as a