I’ve not yet watched the video, but I can confirm booktube is terrible.

I first learned of booktube while learning Spanish. I thought, this will be fun, I can listen to someone talking about books in my target language that I already know or know about.

Turns out that booktubers present the most shallow of descriptions (not analyses).

I would be surprised if most booktubers even read the books they discuss. Essentially they pad out the blurb and talk about the aesthetics of the physical book.

The whole booktube space exists to fetishize books as commodities.

One thing I’m really pissed off about booktube is the shallow understanding of representation and narratives. The YA genre is a prime example of crapitalism in action. There was this pre publication review ad about a YA fantasy that boasted list of fun tropes they use and how much of a feminist book it is. It garnered so much attention but after the publication, all of the hype is gone. Guess what, using girlboss tropes doesn’t make your story feminist or well-written. It’s like theyre just trying to check off a list of what makes a book marketable and popular without any care if the book is written well or not.

Also there’s that whole joke about hoarding books or collecting different cover versions of the same novel without actually reading them that booktok like to boast and its simply reek of mindless consumerism.

Okay, but who is this guy? He started popping up in my YT feed seemingly at random.

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