Is BookTok Leading To Overconsumption?

If you’ve ever opened TikTok and accidentally spent 45 minutes watching strangers sob over plot twists, show off their perfectly colour-coded bookshelves, or dramatically unbox 15 novels they haven’t read yet, well then, welcome to BookTok. It’s fun, chaotic, passionate, and occasionally… unsettling.

As someone deep in the world of literary studies, I find myself both fascinated and slightly disturbed by what BookTok is doing to the way we read. It is getting people excited about books again, which is something to celebrate. But it’s also turning reading into something else entirely: a performance, a lifestyle, and more often than not, a shopping habit.

The Rise of the “Aesthetic Reader”

BookTok, for all its charm, has become increasingly dominated by a kind of curated performance. It’s not just about reading anymore; it’s about being seen to read. Clean desk setups, annotated margins in gel pen, mood lighting, and endless “TBR” (to-be-read) piles.

But something gets lost in this aesthetic overload. Reading starts to feel like an identity we wear rather than an act we do. There’s a quiet pressure to keep buying, to keep up, to own all the trending titles, whether or not we’ll ever actually read them.

It’s reading, repackaged for capitalism.

TBRs and the Trap of “Symbolic Capital”

Here’s a fun little literary theory moment: French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu talked about something called “symbolic capital”—the idea that we use taste (in books, art, and music) as a way of signalling social status.

BookTok is full of symbolic capital. The giant TBR pile is no longer just a backlog; it’s a badge. Look at all the books I might read. The aesthetic shelfie says, I am literary, thoughtful, stylish, and a little mysterious. The sad part? Sometimes the actual content of the books is often treated like an afterthought.

Fast Books, Fast Content

This isn’t just about personal choices; the platform itself shapes how we engage. TikTok thrives on speed, novelty, and visibility. A book has to catch your eye in 5 seconds. Reviews are punchy, emotional, and sometimes spoiler-heavy. You’re not encouraged to sit with a book, revisit it, or read it slowly.

And in that process, the soul of literature starts to slip away. The quiet, strange, slow pleasures of reading, the ones I’ve come to treasure as a lit student, don’t always make good content. What happens to the difficult books? The books that don’t wrap up neatly in 300 pages? The books that demand silence, solitude, and discomfort?

They get left behind.

Desire, Capitalism, and the Fantasy of the Reader-Self

What’s being sold on BookTok is not just books. It is a fantasy. A version of yourself that is well-read, romantic, and productive, maybe a little melancholic in an artsy way. We don’t just want the book. We want what the book says about us.

That’s where overconsumption comes in. You keep buying not because you need more stories, but because you’re chasing a feeling. A version of yourself that feels complete. But books don’t do that. They complicate. They challenge. They undo you.

Walter Benjamin once wrote about the difference between reading books and collecting them. Even back then, he was wary of the tendency to fetishise the object over the experience. Now, in the era of Amazon hauls and shelf tours, that warning feels eerily prophetic.

So… What Do We Do?

I don’t want to romanticise a time before BookTok. It’s done incredible things for marginalised authors, diverse genres, and indie bookshops. But we need to be honest about what it’s also feeding: a capitalist loop of acquisition without reflection.

As literature students, readers, and humans, we need to push back gently. Buy less. Read deeper. Sit with difficult books. Talk about stories that don’t “go viral.” Re-read. Resist the pressure to perform your reading life.

In a world obsessed with speed and visibility, slow reading is a radical act.

TL;DR (but please don’t just TL;DR)

BookTok is fun. But it’s also pushing us toward overconsumption and away from the true richness of reading. Let’s not reduce literature to aesthetics or algorithms. Let’s remember what reading feels like: quiet, strange, transformative, and messy. That’s where the real magic is.

So maybe skip that next book haul and go reread a dog-eared favourite instead. You don’t have to prove anything. You’re already a reader.

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