Kierra Lewis’ face is stained with tears and she’s gulping for breath as her emotions overwhelm her. “I can’t …” she stutters, shaking her head. She looks like she’s grieving the death of a cherished relative. In fact, Kierra has just finished reading the novel Ugly Love and has rushed to the social media platform, TikTok, to share her emotional release. Kierra is neither famous, nor influential, but the 27-second burst of exaltation has been watched close to a million times. It is just a tiny sliver of the emphatic, bawling, joyous community of BookTok bibliophiles who are changing, and some say saving, the book industry.
The BookTok phenomenon has come as a welcome shock to a world that had largely written-off books. With each new technological advance, the chorus declaring that books were in 2007.followed suit in 2011: “Are books dead? Yes, absolutely.”
