Community Beyond the Page | BookTube & Religion with Rachel
Reading is not an isolated activity. While the consumption of words is between the reader and the page, communities have formed around written work since ink first dripped onto a page. YouTube was one of the first social media platforms to host an online book community: “BookTube,” as it soon was dubbed. There, people with a stack of books and a video camera could create and post anything relating to books. I sat down with Rachel, a BookTuber and content creator, and asked about her experience with her online book community and how it’s bled into other social media platforms.
LEX: And then have you been influenced by any creator to buy a book yourself?
RACHEL: All the time. There are a lot of books that I don’t know if I ever would have picked up if it weren’t for another creator. The joy in BookTube is that sometimes one of us finds a gem, and we’re able to share that gem with everybody else; we all get this collective joy out of it. One of my friends in the book community—she doesn’t do videos, but she talks on Twitter quite a bit—her favorite book is The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. She got our entire friend group in the book community to read this book, and we all loved it. It was a book that I had put on my back burner, and I would eventually get to it. I didn’t really know what it was about, but I thought it looked fine. But then, she was so passionate about it that all of us ended up buying it and reading it and loving it.
LB: What other kind of book creators would you recommend to other people besides yourself?
RP: Oh, my gosh—so many. I think one of the biggest resources on BookTube are actual librarians who are in the community. One librarian is Ashley from Bookish Realm. She has one of the best channels and is so informative. She does so many different things that I think are so important, like talking about children’s books and not just Young Adult and Adult. She talks about any sort of discourse that comes up in the book community; she’s also a fellow mom, so I enjoy seeing how she balances doing BookTube and being a parent. And with her being a librarian, you get a lot from that perspective. I think that her channel is just such a find for anybody that comes across it. And then, if you like people who are snarkier like me, Liene from Liene’ Library is super sarcastic and rant reads a lot like me.
To read the full interview, visit Lex’s blog here.