Content, Forms, Uses, and Impacts of Bookstagrammers and Booktokers: A Review

Abstract

Since the beginning of virtual communication, actors in the reading ecosystem have explored ways to share their readings; to build conversations or to create community with their peers. Existing literature has predominantly focused its attention on blog platforms and YouTube. To advance knowledge, this article focuses on understanding how, why, and in what way readers, institutions, and companies share, discuss, recommend, or sell books on Instagram and TikTok. This work presents the results of the content analysis of the 37 articles resulting from the framework carried out between January 11 and 15, 2024; The corpus has been expanded with the 66 documents from the systematic review of Sanz-Tejeda y Lluch (2024) carried out between June 1 and 23, 2022. In order to offer a more systematic and precise map, the results are organized around the topics of interest present in most of the research: the relationship of bookstagrammers and titktokers with bloggers and booktubers; the shared content, focusing the results on three relevant aspects: the use of tags, the books promoted and the audiovisual review; the form of the content, answering questions about the images used and the type of feelings they seek to build; the use made by professional and institutional administrators, mainly libraries, publishers and bookstores and the impact that celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon or Emma Watson have on these networks when they promote a book. After constructing this map, a roadmap for future research is proposed.