Think Gen Zs might not be the biggest bookworms?
Well, think again (kind of).
Because according to our latest Big Youth survey, when we asked 1367 Gen Zs aged 15 to 24 nationwide if they still actually read books, 12% said they did daily, 12% most days of the week, 12% some days of the week and 7% weekly. This means in total 43% of young Australians kick back with a book on a weekly basis.
When you add the 7% who read books fortnightly you get a nice round figure of 50% of Gen Zs reading books every couple of weeks.
A further 6% said they read books monthly.
In total about the same percentage (44%) of young Australians said they only read books occasionally (29%) or never (15%), so Gen Zs are split down the middle between voracious book readers and those who hardly pick them up at all.
Separate research from YPulse found reading is one of the top five hobbies for Gen Zs, especially since the onset of the pandemic.
So for the half of Gen Zs who read books regularly what is behind their passion for reading amongst a generation that was brought up with screens as the norm?
Introducing ‘BookTok’
Yep. BookTok is exactly what you think it is.
BookTok is a ‘niche’ or ‘sub-community’ where enthusiastic teens share their book recommendations on TikTok.
It’s so popular that even Barnes and Noble has jumped on the BookTok train, dedicating in-store tables for books that have become popular on BookTok.
They’ve also created a dedicated landing page on their website for Gen Zs looking to discover the most popular ‘TikTok books’.
Some literary insiders even go as far as to say that BookTok ‘owns the literary world’.
“BookTok is revolutionising the literature world,” wrote Christianna Silva, a senior culture reporter for Mashable.
“For the past two years, books have been climbing the charts not on the backs of movie and TV deals or some miraculous PR stunt, but because users on TikTok deemed it worthy.”
And the numbers don’t lie.
In fact, according to BookScan, BookTok assisted in the sales of 20 million books in 2021.
In 2022? That went up 50%.
So the question remains, what impact is BookTok going to have in 2023?
