Bookstagram Is Where Reading Goes To Die

Beth McCallum, a United Kingdom-based Bookstagrammer and writer in a stridently articulated rebuttal to The Guardian’s “attack” on the Bookstagram community said, “I don’t think people who do photograph their real reading experience would have much of an influence on the community because aesthetic does matter.” In another instance, Vietnamese American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong in an interview to Devon Murphy of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity said, “For me to read a book….is a way of reclaiming what is real for oneself.”

McCallum and Vuong will agree on one thing: reading is indeed an experience. The difference between them materializes in how they locate reading as a single act within larger elements of what eventually becomes an experience of it. Bookstagram focuses on selling and reselling of that experience. 

A book tastefully tousled between blankets, a scented candle, a tray of pancakes, and a glass of wine. The 85.5 million search results of #Bookstagram will reveal thousands of images featuring these props. A growing trend, Bookstagram is a social media sub-culture created for connecting, reviewing, sharing, and marketing books and authors with people brought together by shared literary pursuits. 

The reading community of Instagram often finds itself tested on the following parameters: lighting, camera quality, photo-editing skills, user engagement, hashtags, consistency in posting, and most importantly, the aesthetics. On Bookstagram, along with books, the life of the person posting about it is also put on display. Social media creates an environment conducive for such a relationship to exist between the influencer and the follower. Aysha Kulsum, a bookstagrammer, said, “Rather than books, it has become more about portraying a rich lifestyle. It is the stuff we read on Tumblr.” 

Bookstagram is believed to thrive on the idea of making reading aesthetic, visual, evocative, romantic, and with that, exclusive. 

“What I have understood from my own experience is that more than the books, people follow you for the life you are presenting. It is so romanticised. If you just post about books, nobody will care. They are keener on the life of the person behind it. It is in fact never about the books,” Kulsum adds. 

As Bookstagram mainstreamed, its effects physically translated into increasing book sales. Publishers considered it essential for book promotion. They started reaching out to people from the community for online promotions. This trickled down into more books available for posting, giving way to things like book hauls, book giveaways, and book stack images. It is done for reasons such as influencing people to buy them or to exhibit the number of books owned by the blogger. 

“Consumerism has become a huge problem on Bookstagram. People are buying more and more books and then competing on Goodreads and Bookstagram to reach a certain number of books in a year. This can lead to shallow and rushed reading,” said Zainab Waziri, a Bookstagrammer. She further added, “It is up to us how we navigate this space of social media without letting the consumerism consume us.” 

Reading is essentially reduced to daily statistics, expediting into uncritical mass consumption where more books are hoarded than read. It has largely come to center around: how many books do you own, how many books you bought at the bookstore, how many books did you read this month or last year? 

“Reading is lost in numbers. It is a race of who has clicked a better picture, or look, I got a new book. Bookstagram was supposed to imitate a real-life book club where people would read books, discuss it, have reading goals, but instead it has become your regular clichéd tag-which-gets-you-a-better-reach thing,” said a Bookstagrammer who preferred to be anonymous. 

While Bookstagram can further literary discourses, it also actively alienates readers on the basis of affordability. Bookstagram byproducts like #shelfies which is a selfie with your bookshelf reduced books to a commodity, stripping them off their critical value. More than cognitive senses, the setting of Bookstagram is designed to cater to visual or aesthetic senses. Popular imagination becomes a site of contestation as readers on the internet are made to rally behind books being promoted by the Bookstagrammers. The Instagram algorithm underpins this phenomenon. 

“Under the pressure of creating content, it is seen that the best performing profiles are those that have an endless supply of physical books. This definitely points to a class and capitalist angle, with the publishing industry pushing big Bookstagrammers as spaces of reviews and exposure — read as free advertising. Of course, the alternative is also true with a lot of Bookstagrammers supporting independent publishers and bookstores who need the sales. But it definitely comes more comfortably for certain sections more than others,” said Rizowana Hussaini, a Phd candidate and a Bookstagrammer. 

Holly Connolly in an article for The Guardian said that that “books…have become something of an accessory.” Bookstagrammers have thus changed the existing relationship between books and reading, purportedly making it more consumerist in nature. Beyond intellectual pleasure, reading is now fashionable, an aesthetic performance for social media validation. It has now transcended its purpose on this corner of Instagram. 

(Nuzhat Khan is a student of MA Convergent Journalism at AJK Mass Communications Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia.)