Durban - Social media made us forget phone numbers and how to follow directions.
However, far from leading to the total dumbing down of society, the world of apps has emerged as a niche way to get people reading again.
Enter BookTok and Bookstagram, the newest ways in which writers and publishers are selling their stories and making the New York bestseller lists.
We’re not talking about shortened misspelt texts that have no resemblance to normal writing or spelling conventions.
Instead, both the young and the old are going online and making reading sexy again by flaunting what they think you should read.
Even titles that had been out of circulation for decades have been revived.
Cue the music, the emojis, and the books; and, of course, the influencer teasing you with just enough pouting so that you want to get your hands on their books.
And while BookTok videos are getting billions of views, and many book influencers have followers in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, it has translated into sales too, and books are literally flying off the shelves.
“One can barely talk about books or a booklist without mentioning BookTok ‒ the TikTok app phenomenon that has quite literally saved the book industry the world over, particularly in a post-Covid reality,’’ said Exclusive Books general manager for marketing, loyalty and procurement Batya Bricker.
The company has bought into the idea, and the results are paying off.
In a recent presentation, Exclusive Books duo Shakti Pillay and Justine Stevens said their BookTok list was influenced by international trends and queries on social media.
Pillay and Stevens described the new generation of readers influenced by social media as mostly female, between 16 and 35 years old, liberal, opinionated, encouraging of diverse voices and dominated by influencers in the US and UK, which are two of the three biggest book markets.
The new way of selling books, they say, includes recommendations from peers rather than “alien experts”; sensory experiences which focus on how it makes you feel rather than literary reviews; and “super-charged word-of-mouth”.
BookTok is a sub-community of TikTok, a platform that hosts short videos by various users. It was made in China and went global in 2018.
Currently, TikTok has an estimated one billion users, with 6.44 million of them in South Africa.
To get onto BookTok, go to Google play or the app store that works for you.
Download the TikTok app.
Once your account is set up, type #BookTok in the search bar and an endless array of book videos from BookTokers will flood your screen.
Bookstagram is the offspring of Instagram, a video- and photo-sharing app that is owned by Facebook and has close to 1.4 billion users globally, of which 6.9 million are in Mzansi. It is also available on app stores.
The Independent on Saturday