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| Source: http://www.kassidyvoinche.com/p/booktube.html |
Youtube is one of the best places to find communities and materials that suit your own habits and preferences. Whether you’re a gaming addict, a beauty enthusiast, or you just want to watch funny cat videos, Youtube is full of content for your every need. For all my fellow readers out there, there’s a small niche for us in this huge community—BookTube. It’s basically a subset of YouTube where content creators focus on books and book-related activities. I discovered this around a year ago, and it has drastically affected how I read and how I viewed the reading community.
Reading More
When you see someone talking about the twelve books they finished that month, you’re gonna want to up your game by catching up with your own reading. Not all BookTubers read at the same pace, though. On some months, a few of them read only one to four books while others can read between eight and fifteen, depending on their schedules and the length of books they’re reading. Either way, it makes you feel more inspired to read and add to the list of books you read for that year. Personally, I read about three times as much now compared to my pre-BookTube days.
Tracking My Reading
I used to just read books and put them away afterward. But after discovering BookTube, I found out that most readers actually track their reading to compare their progress each year and to see if they are reading as much as they want to. The number one tool readers use to do this is Goodreads. It’s a site where you can search for the book you read or want to read or have just read, and it allows you to create virtual shelves for different book categories. It also enables the reading community to communicate and find out one another’s opinions for each book because it has a rating and review system. It also has a feature where you can set the number of the books you want to read for a year called the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Personally, I use Goodreads as well as a notebook where I write the name of the books I’ve read, the author, and the date and time I finished the book.
Book Events
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| Source: http://modernmrsdarcy.com/book-expo-america-bookcon-review/ |
BookTube introduced me to several activities readers look forward to annually. I didn’t know there were things like book conventions, where readers gather and celebrate their love for reading and meeting their favorite authors. Reading for me was always a solitary process, but through BookTube, I realized that it could be a fun group activity as well. There are a lot of communities that choose a book or several books for a particular time span, and they can read the books together and have a live discussion afterward. This creates an encouraging atmosphere and is a great motivation boost for those who are in a reading slump.
Book Synopsis
Every BookTuber and BookTube enthusiast is guilty of this: knowing the synopses of books and talking about them as if they have already read them when they actually haven’t. The majority of BookTube videos feature readers talking about the books they’ve read and books they are about to read. Aside from showing the subscribers the book covers, the main dish of every video is the synopsis. Since most BookTubers talk about the same books at the same time, those of us watching will already have a good idea what a particular book is about and could probably recite the synopsis by heart—without actually reading them.
Challenges
One of the most interesting discoveries I made when I started watching BookTube is the reading challenges. The most common is the yearly challenge, which is tracked through Goodreads, but there are lots more fun and weird challengesout there that keeps the readers reading more and discovering new authors and genres. I’ve never tried any of these because I don’t have that many books to select from, and there’s also the issue of time I have available for reading. But I think it’s a fun thing to try out when you have the resources.
New Genres
When I was starting out with reading for leisure back in high school, I didn’t have much choice about the books I could read. We didn’t have a bookstore in our city, and the only time I’d get to have a new book is when my father goes on trips. Because it was such a rare opportunity for me, I would choose books that have withstood the test of time—classics. I was the person who thought that there are no other respectable genres out there except for classics. I would laugh at other people who would read contemporary love stories or graphic novels because I thought they weren’t “real books.” But after watching bookstubers talk about different genres like fantasy, horror, young adult, sci-fi, etc., I got interested and decided to try them out. I was happily surprised after doing so because I found out that most of the books they recommended are actually really good and entertaining. I was opened up to a whole new world. It was BookTube that made me read the Harry Potter series, which I swore I would never like. Because of the enthusiastic BookTubers, I learned to love fantasy and horror and even introduced me to more classic books.
Overall, the BookTube community is a great help to me mostly because it widened my horizon and opened me up to new worlds that I refused to acknowledge before. It encourages me to read more and discover more ideas through reading. If you’re new to this idea, here are the links to the channels of some of my favorite BookTubers:
It's a Ping Thing 