Tiktok reading community BookTok prompts reading surge

22 May 2023

Short-form video hosting service TikTok certainly has its nay-sayers. Security analysts believe the app may be compromising the privacy of users, while lawmakers in some countries are considering banning it. But the news isn’t all bad: TikTok appears to be behind a recent surge in book readership, thanks to the app’s reading community, BookTok, according to Kristen McLean of NPD Bookscan:

The romance novel It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover was the second best-selling Adult Fiction book and sixth best-selling book overall in 2021 — selling more than 770,000 copies last year — despite being a backlist title originally published in 2016, and McLean believes that is “almost exclusively there because of BookTok,” where it was championed.