A Little Information
Almost everyone knows what YouTube does, but not everyone knows about BookTube. BookTube is the name of a community of readers and book lovers who make videos and talk about books. There are a lot of BookTube channels but there are even more viewers, who just watch and comment on videos. The majority of BookTube reads Young Adult Fiction but they are not exclusive and you can find channels that suit your likes.
There are a variety of types of videos that BookTubers make. These include:
- Book reviews
- Book talks (talking about what you felt while reading and what you think, but less formal than a review)
- Book hauls (showing off the books you acquired that month; with BookTube, these can get pretty big!)
- Bookshelf tours (showing off all the books you own)
- Tag games (a challenge/game that you do with yourself or with other people and then you "tag" other BookTubers and they have to do the challenge)
- And more!
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| Jesse from jessethereader tries to hold all the books from a book haul. |
Positives
BookTube came into existence about 4 years ago and has been growing ever since. There are a lot of positives that have come out of this. You can find book recommendations and you can find someone to share your thoughts about a book with and just get those feelings out if you need too. If you make your own videos and you have enough subscribers, you will grab the attention of some authors and publishers and you can get free books to review. BookTubers with a lot of subscribers can even get invited to interview authors or get invited to movie premieres to interview the cast.
BookTube is a very accepting community. Most members will accept you no matter whether your videos are deemed "high-quality" or not. BookTube is really a place for people to find other people who love books just as much as they do. If you are always thinking about books or are especially emotional over a book/character, then this is the place for you. The people just get you here.
BookTube is a place to make friends from all over the world. Usually friends will talk over text messaging or Skype and it will feel like any normal friend...except they might live on the other side of the country. Or the world. This doesn't make the friendship any less valid, especially when you can talk about things you can't talk about to anyone you know in person. Many BookTubers go to Book Expo of America and VidCon to meet up with the friends they've made and to meet their subscribers.
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| Ariel from Ariel Bissett explains BookTube |
Negatives
Just as with everything, there are a few negative areas. Most common are negative comments, which you will get anywhere on the Internet if you have a big following.
There are a lot of "big-name" BookTubers who are treated as celebrity figures, which makes it hard on the rest of the community who just want to act like friends and talk about books. For example, on Twitter (a BookTuber hot spot for communicating with subscribers), many fans will freak out if a big-name BookTuber replies to them. It used to be that fans could buy their favorite BookTuber a book from their Amazon wishlist, but some BookTubers were getting close to 20 books a month! So they took down the wishlist because most fans were just sending them to get a shout out in a video. Because of this, a few cliques have sprung up and now it is really hard to be friends with specific people, when before, you could just message anyone and start a conversation.
Recommendations
Overall, I would recommend watching BookTube if you are into reading. And if not, then I hope this blog post was informative about a powerful and interesting part of the Internet. Despite its faults, I truly believe it is a wonderful community. I shall leave you with some recommendations of my favorite channels to check out if you are interested:
- Jesse from jessethereader
- Novella Zoo
- Christine from polandbananaBOOKS
- Kat from Katytastic
- Ariel from Ariel Bissett
- Jessica from priceiswong
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