Almost everything today is on a digital device, most commonly on a mobile phone. It doesn’t matter what the activity is – travel, hobbies, shopping, dining or any other aspect of life – it’s available on a mobile application. No wonder, then, that even reading has got re-invented on social media. But is that a good trend or is it problematic? There are no easy answers.
Bookstagram, as the work suggests, is the book club equivalent of Instagram. It is a reader’s Instagram account that focuses on books, stacking them to look impressive, briefly reviewing them and keeping the attention of a scroller for a few seconds.
Even traditional publishers rave about Bookstagram. Penguin, the world famous publisher, has a special page where it celebrates digital book lovers: “One of the best corners of the internet is, without a doubt, #bookstagram. Readers from around the world celebrate their love for the printed word with boundless creativity”.
Clearly, being on social media is an important way of getting attention. The posts are creative, colourful, edgy and opinionated. Their target audience is the social media native – one who scrolls between posts, has different interests and ostensibly little time to spend on a detailed description, review or discussion of a book.
Still, it does bring younger audience to read, or at least, close to a digital picture of a book. The common complaint about Gen Zs is that they do not read anything substantial, but research suggests that it is not that they read less but that the sources that they read from have changed. Bookstagram is one such example.
If packaging is key to bringing in an audience, online platforms are doing a good job with all the innovative ways in which they add photos, videos, animations and catchy quotations to stand out from thousands of similar sites. Such a micro site also connects people together, often giving opportunities to share similar interests, taste in books and even collaborate in the future. Often, such sites also lead to more formal book clubs, competitions and even introduce book signing events.
If all this is possible through bookstagram, is there an issue? To the extent that reading has become another commodity, just like high fashion or unboxing trends, reading seems to have just become another trend, fashionable until it is not.
A 30-second reel or shot surely does not do justice to a book, even if it merely introduces it. While the intention may be to make those interested reach out for the books shown in a reel, the fleeting way in which an author or a book is announced barely makes a dent.
The focus on appearance – of colour, layout, style and movement – takes over any discussion of content that may have been an intention in sharing a book recommendation. By virtue of its genre, a bookstagram feed has to be attractively minimal, not deeply thoughtful.
The reading habit has certainly changed and bookstagrams have contributed largely to this trend, but whether it has added to the quality of reading will remain uncertain for the near future.
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