If you have TikTok, you have probably run across a few book-related videos. This side of TikTok is called “BookTok”; in videos of the sort, people recommend books to viewers and talk about book-related content. But is “BookTok” eliminating creativity in literature forever and making the world of literature a box that one must fit in to succeed?

“BookTok” videos are an inspirational tool to captivate viewers into picking up a beneficial hobby: reading. Reading has many benefits for a person, such as increasing focus, increasing attention span, helping a person achieve goals, improving their vocabulary, and lowering their screen time.

There are a myriad of reasons that reading helps a person, and “BookTok” is one of the greatest reasons for new and upcoming readers. In addition, “BookTok” creates a wonderful and expansive community for readers and authors to give feedback and talk about their favorite stories. So, how could it be a bad thing?

Unfortunately, “BookTok” supports very specific stories, characters, and authors, making new authors strive to become “TikTok famous” in hopes of selling more copies of their books. Since authors are striving to sell their books, they try to write within the ideas of popular books and are not innovating new stories.

This is changing literature as the world knows it, making it lose all its originality and making new authors tied down to specific and popular archetypes, making literature stay at a constant standstill. So many new books have similar plots, characters, and endings, changing literature to be more money-focused than the actual applause of the author’s works.

In turn, this also makes it much harder for new and small authors to sell their books, as people do not shop for books by reading their summaries. People now use Google or watch videos to get recommendations. This leaves new authors forgotten about, and literature serves as a template for the same stories to be written again and again.

To summarize, “BookTok” can be a wonderful community in which people and authors can collaborate and talk about their thoughts and ideas. However, the toxic one-mindedness of some viewers has turned the community into one that only looks for copies of old favorites, leaving new authors and new stories behind. So, I am not telling you to stop reading all the famous “BookTok” books, but the next time you are in a bookstore, maybe judge a book by its cover and read the back.