Amazon has announced a major partnership with TikTok in an attempt to tap into the influencer-led popularity of all things literary.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The announcement is of a link between Audible and BookTok. The flagship offering will be a #BestofBookTok section within the Audible app. It promises links to the latest trending titles from the social reading community. It will present titles differentiated, it promises, at the microgenre level, citing dark academia as an example, and Romantasy, a genre possibility slightly less than micro.
Influencers and Reading Habits
This announcement led me down a couple of interesting side quests. First, this post on The Bookseller offers an interesting insight into the potential homogenization of reading, and more specifically what books people are reading. It argues that the book influencer phenomenon might be narrowing rather than expanding the variety of books that people are encouraged to read, as content clusters around a set list of titles.
I’m not part of bookish social media, but in one of my other interests, horror cinema, I certainly notice a similar trend toward narrowing, as creators seek views and likes by focusing on hot-button films.
Regulation, Reach, and Market Share
The BBC has also taken a deep dive into the Australian social media ban. This clip in particular tackles a topic relevant here, namely the impact of the ban on influencers who are under sixteen. In the BookTok world, where young adults (and younger) sharing their passion with other young adults is ostensibly the beating heart of a peer-to-peer cultural community, this will inevitably have an impact.
One of the interesting things about the situation in Australia is that, so far, online gaming has been exempted. Chat during gaming is, of course, essentially social media by another name, and it will be interesting to see how communities migrate.
Finally, Mark Williams has, as always, an interesting take on the announcement in The New Publishing Standard. A key point he makes is that at this stage it might not be that partnerships like this are bringing new listeners into the audiobook world. Instead, such efforts may be more about carving out a share of a market that already exists.
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