What Is BookTube? All About YouTube’s Reading Community & Book List (Exclusive)

What Is BookTube? Learn More About YouTube’s Reading Community – And See Their First Official Reading List! — Cindy Pham and Jack Edwards. Photo:
youtube

Calling all book lovers — the BookTube community has some exciting news to share.

PEOPLE can exclusively reveal "BookTube’s Ultimate Reading List Through The Years,” a list of some of the most popular titles that have been featured in book-focused YouTube videos since 2012. The list features an array of novels and memoirs, from John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars to recent favorites like The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Spare by Prince Harry.

For years, book enthusiasts have taken to YouTube to share their opinions on what they’re reading and what’s going on in the literary world. That community — known as BookTube — has since expanded into one of the social platform's longest running communities. As of early 2024, videos with “BookTube” in their title have been viewed more than 350 million times, per a statement from YouTube shared with PEOPLE.

“BookTubers really filled a void that we maybe didn't even know was there, which was having a more personal connection to learning how to decide what to read,” says Madeline Buxton, a culture and trends manager at YouTube, who says that the company created the Ultimate Reading List to better understand what books were discussed the most on the platform.

In an exclusive video shared with PEOPLE, two BookTube content creators, Cindy Pham (@withcindy) and Jack Edwards (@jack_edwards), revealed the titles as well as insight into how the BookTube community has evolved.

Edwards originally began his YouTube channel to document his life as a first-generation university student. He tells PEOPLE that he wanted to talk about the books that he wasn’t reading for his literature degree, and that he incorporated those videos into his channel.

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“Now online creators can be somewhere in between book fan and book critic, which kind of democratizes the whole thing,” he says. Edwards is now known online for his niche BookTube content, such as rating all of the books that Lisa Simpson reads on The Simpsons and ranking how appropriate they are for an 8-year-old, or reading decorative books he purchased on Etsy (where Edwards subsequently found a new favorite book).

“I think the weirder, the better,” he says. His YouTube channel, which currently has more than 1.3 million subscribers, has earned him the nickname of “the Internet’s Resident Librarian” and led to opportunities like interviewing Dua Lipa, herself an avid reader, and hosting the livestream for the prestigious Booker Prize.

“To get to be a digital creator and have access to those rooms…I feel so lucky to get to do that because I'm not a book journalist or trained in that way,” Edwards says. “It's just from raw passion that I've been sharing online.”

Pham launched her YouTube channel in 2018. After reading Melissa Meyer’s young adult sci-fi series The Lunar Chronicles, Pham wanted a place to share her thoughts. YouTube, she says, not only became a platform for her to review what she was reading, but also to get to know a larger bookish community.

“I really liked how all kinds of people were super creative with the type of video that they were making, whether that was book reviews or doing other genres of BookTube videos,” she says. Pham’s channel has also evolved alongside her interests, and features everything from vlogs to her thoughts on book-to-screen adaptations and longer-form videos about publishing-industry scandals. Through the online book community, she's been invited into Netflix's writers room to pitch marketing ideas for the screen adaptation of Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone series, interviewed David Sedaris and even met her girlfriend.

"That was a big thing for me," Pham says. "I wasn't even conscious of queerness until I joined the book community because they're so socially conscious and progressive." BookTube as a whole, she adds, is in a new era where creators are becoming more intentional and inclusive with their content.

“I feel like we are going to continue going that direction,” she says, adding that, “Today, people are much more conscious of who is creating the work that we're reading, who [we are] choosing to amplify and boost."

Though the BookTube reading list ends at 2023, there are already new kinds of BookTube content on the rise. Silent book reviews, in which readers share their thoughts on books using only their emotions, and more personalized reading recommendations are popular, Buxton says. Creators are also tying book recommendations to pop culture moments, like the Charli xcx-inspired trend “Brat Summer.”

“I think we're seeing that BookTubers are reading a broader variety of books than ever before,” Buxton says. “It might've had its origins in YA literature, but now you can find pretty much anything and so many targeted videos that are really honed towards specific interests.”

“The beauty with books is that there will always be new books to read and there will always be new books coming out,” Edwards says. “So there's always something fresh to make content about.”

And for those curious about starting a BookTube channel of their own? Pham has some words of advice.

“At the end of the day, you still have to do it because you love books so much, not because you're trying to get money out of it or get sponsorships,” she says. “Because if that were the case, there's so many more options that you could do…It's really driven by passion for books first and foremost.”

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See below for BookTube’s Ultimate Reading List Through the Years:

2012
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2013
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

2014
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2015
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

2016
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

2018
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

2019
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey