BookTok in schools: A force for good or evil?

“Social media platforms seem to have a time and place. What was fashionable a few years ago gives way to newer trends.” A/Prof Leonie Rutherford

Associate Professor Leonie Rutherford is a researcher in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Her current study, Discovering A Good Read (DAGR), investigates Australian teenagers’ reading habits and their preferences for discovering ‘good reads’.

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Interestingly, her research has shown that social media recommendations (28%) rank well behind other methods in popularity, including recommendations from friends (57%) and simply reading another book by an author they like (61%). In good news for bookshops, 48% of teens surveyed sourced recommendations and books from bookstores.

“Readers who connect with bookish social media accounts do report reading more as a result and BookTok has certainly had a significant impact on book sales and book marketing in recent years,” says Rutherford. “However, readers who engage with book social media also report seeing the same few books recommended over and over. This is due to the impact of social media algorithms that amplify viral content as well as the popularity of certain genres on book social media, in particular romance, fantasy, and young adult fiction.”

The role of the TikTok algorithm

While Rutherford’s research shows that one in four teenagers access social media sites such as BookTok to discover new reads, the question becomes: ‘What are they being shown?’

“BookTok videos reflect the playful, unrehearsed aesthetic of TikTok. They are most often short, fast, and loud, featuring music or sounds trending on TikTok,” explains Rutherford. “The key strength of TikTok is its basis in a musical format (dance) and its algorithm, which serves users a constant range of new content and amplifies viral content rather than user-chosen areas of interest. This has the upside of exposing users to new trends which may lead to the discovering of new interests.”

Avril Felicity is a TikTok creator, filmmaker, and bookseller who started her own BookTok channel in 2023. In addition to TikTok’s viral nature, she warns that the strict rules governing creators can sometimes lead to misleading or ambiguous messages about books.

“BookTok can provide easy-to-find recommendations that may get a kid into reading,” says Felicity. “However, there is a distinct lack of content created for Young, Middle Grade and Teenage readers. This can lead to kids’ reading books that are not age appropriate.”

“Due to TikTok algorithms many creators can’t say outright what a book is about or any of the content and trigger warnings associated, this means that the creator is relying heavily on the media and literacy of viewers to ascertain the true intentions of a book.” Avril Felicity

This is something that the DAGR study has reinforced. “Most of the teacher librarians we interviewed report having a mechanism to monitor content that may not be age-appropriate,” says Rutherford.

“We used to have Colleen Hoover books in our collection”, explains the Teacher Librarian from a Catholic Girls School in Victoria. “However after reading most of them, I decided to weed the books from our collection. I found the graphic sexual content of some titles to be an issue for younger students as well as some sections that included sexual violence and characters who were in abusive relationships.”

Broadening horizons

But while some of the books promoted on BookTok are not suitable for schools, librarians admit that students watching and thinking about books and reading is always a good thing.

“I think BookTok is a good thing if it encourages young people to read and hopefully it can open up new authors to them,” says one Teacher Librarian from a Victorian Catholic College.

“Anything that encourages reading is great,” adds a Teacher Librarian of a West Australian Christian High School. “But of course, that doesn’t mean good books equals good literary merit,” she adds.

“I find BookTok helpful when deciding upon purchases, but as the recommendations focus on romance and relationships, I don’t buy everything that trends, as there are still readers who look for sci-fi, adventure, historical, etc,” says a librarian from a public school in West Melbourne. “I overheard a student say “look, that book is on BookTok“, I felt that justified that the ways I select reading material that is relevant to my student cohort.”

Is Booktok sufficiently representative?

One criticism of BookTok is its lack of representation and diversity, both in its content creators and the books it promotes.

“The BookTok community is mostly populated by white women in their 20s and 30s, leading to a lack of diversity,” admits Felicity. “While there are creators that are actively advocating for change, there was recently some controversy where a few creators felt they shouldn’t be scrutinised for reading what they like, which is also an important message, although this creator was referring to the lack of diversity within their reading.”

Not all the respondents to this story agreed about the level of diversity visible on BookTok.

One teacher librarian from Victoria stated “In regards to the homogeneity of the titles promoted on BookTok, I agree many of them appear to depict white, often American, characters, often middle class.”

While another from a Christian school in Western Australia felt “that YA books now seem to all contain racial and cultural minorities to the point of tokenism.”

While there is a wide range of content on social media channels like TikTok, what consumers see varies wildly depending on how active or passive they are. Passive consumers who allow the algorithm to send them videos will have a very different experience from those who actively use search terms and hashtags to find specific things.

A/Prof Rutherford says: “The operation of social media algorithms means that the content created by diverse creators is less visible and needs to be more proactively sought out by social media users.” She adds: “There is very little Australian content on BookTok—our small market and population mean that we don’t influence the algorithm much.”

A Teacher Librarian from a public secondary school in Western Australia says she uses BookTok as a search tool, actively seeking out specific types of books: “I have found that I have had to watch a lot of BookTok videos to find suitable recommendations for middle school readers. There seems to be quite a bit of YA content, but for older readers. I have used BookTok to find recommendations about specific genres, particularly about racial and cultural minorities, LGBTQI+ but I have not come across many BookTok videos that focus on disabilities.”

Avril Felicity explains “If you have a good understanding of the algorithm, you can find a space for yourself in which the creators around you are like-minded and express diversity, although most young participants don’t yet know the intricacies of the internet and internet literacy.”

Is BookTok a force for good or evil?

Whether schools feel that the books promoted on BookTok have a place in their libraries, the platform itself can provide a valuable teaching experience.

“I believe BookTok can be used to teach kids media literacy skills. If use is guided by a parent or schools, BookTok can be used to explain how content creation is curated to match the algorithm and what is popular. BookTok is safer than many other places on the internet as creators are prevented from being explicit, but they still work to alter the way things are presented. This allows kids to learn the ways the internet can deceive them while also generally staying safe from seeing something they shouldn’t.” @avrilfelicity