Booktok, Algorithmic Taste, and the Remaking of Contemporary Literary Culture

Abstract

A short vertical video, filmed on a phone and scored to a trending sound, now sells more novels in some markets than a review in a national newspaper. This article examines BookTok, the reading community that formed on TikTok after 2020, as a genuine shift in how literary value is produced and circulated. Industry data collected by NielsenIQ BookData and by TikTok itself put the scale beyond doubt: more than 50 million recommended titles sold across European markets in 2025 alone. The argument here is not that a platform has replaced older gatekeepers. It is that BookTok has fused three functions which literary culture had kept apart for two centuries, namely reviewing, retailing and sociable reading, and has placed the fused product under algorithmic management. The article traces this through the sociology of taste, through platform studies, and through the commercial record of the romantasy boom and the backlist revival. Two consequences receive particular attention. The first is the narrowing of what gets amplified, since recommendation systems reward affective intensity rather than difficulty. The second is the fragility of a literary infrastructure that a single regulatory decision, or a single change to a ranking function, can dismantle overnight. BookTok is best read not as the democratisation of taste but as its relocation, from institutions that could be argued with to systems that cannot.