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You hang out on TikTok when you're too cool for Instagram and too young to have heard of Facebook.

The Chinese platform gathers short videos, mostly underlaid with snippets of music or dialogues, to which teenagers perform lip-synching or choreographed dances.

Previously a maximum of 15 seconds, today no longer than 60. To get to the next video, swipe up.

Now, of all people, the literary community has discovered the four-year-old program for itself.

And with that, two media are connected that at first glance could hardly be more different: fleeting clips in a matter of seconds advertise a format that lasts, for the book.

Anyone who clicks through the hashtag #BookTok, which has already been viewed six billion times, can observe scenes like the following: A young American woman holds the cover of a favorite book in the camera and says with a grin: “Hey, that's the first day when I say 'That Read the song of Achilles. "

Postmodern literary criticism: @Aymansbooks

Source: @ AymansBooks / TikTok

Cut.

Next scene.

The woman sobs and yells with reddened eyes: “And that's me when I have finished with the book.” In addition, the gaudy caption: “Dramatic howling and screaming”.

Finally, she peppers the book in the corner of the room in Denis Scheck's manner - not, however, as the literary critic does monthly in his monthly program "Druckfrisch" with those bestsellers that contradict his quality criteria, but exactly the other way around: Throwing it away with Karacho is considered an accolade among the BookTok gestures.

It means that a book has touched and disturbed you so much that you don't want to touch it for a second longer.

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Emotional outpouring and a crying attack are not only used by 20-year-old Ayman, whose @aymansbooks account has 190,900 followers, to emphatically reinforce a book tip.

18-year-old Selene, whose @moongirlreads account is followed by 138,000 people, posted a video in August featuring "books that will make you sob".

Including: "The Song of Achilles".

Madeline Miller's novel was published in 2012, but according to the New York Times report, it sells nine times as often today as it did eight years ago.

All thanks to TikTok.

The same thing happened to Miller, the author E. Lockhart, whose novel “As long as we lie” was originally published in 2014, but last year again climbed the American bestseller lists overnight.

Some of the most famous BookTokers have now signed promotional deals or received book gifts from authors.

Postmodern, participatory dynamics

The influence of pop literature recommendations on the book market is so great that the American bookstore Barnes & Noble has set up book tables for current BookTok bestsellers in some branches and has a list of the best on its website.

Although a literary community has long been established in the older social medium Instagram, which exchanges news about new publications apart from the dusty feuilleton debates, it has not yet been able to secure a table in the most popular bookstore chain in the USA.

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In Germany, too, BookTok is gaining more and more fans, the videos in the form of lists (“Books that have changed my perspective on life”), competitions (“Show me a book that makes you sad, a book that you have already read five times and share a book whose title sums up your life ”), guides (“ Tips for long reading ”) and aesthetic clips (“ Why I put my books upside down on the shelf ”).

Time-lapse videos, for example when reading or strolling through an antiquarian bookshop, are just as popular as the sub-genres "Dark Academia", which aesthetically stages a dark yearning for library education and yellowed tomes with gilt edging, and "Unboxing", the enjoyable tearing open of Amazon- Packages.

In contrast to expert criticism, BookTok attracts with a participatory dynamic: anyone can upload a video, comment on contributions, accept challenges, and continue trends.

Instead of originality, the app relies on postmodern ideas of repetition, variation and ironic imitation.

Thanks to the algorithm, whether a video becomes a trend doesn't even depend on how many followers you have.

Crying as a quality criterion

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Genres such as young adult fiction, adventure and fantasy dominate the platform.

BookTokers, incidentally predominantly female, read, like the women of the 18th century, who were much scolded for their reading addiction, extensively, immersively and identically.

They devour the letters like their screens.

And their judgment is similarly subjective.

It is not their aim to use objectively comprehensible criteria.

In the end, classic literary criticism has just as little fear of the new, fresh tone with which BookTok is stirring up the literature market as it is of literary programs, Amazon customer reviews, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, Bookstagram and BookTube that were once perceived as an unknown threat.

The question of whether the tears-adorned seconds clips that advertise the spine of books held in the camera are a new form of literary criticism, or whether the concept of influencerism does not do justice to the matter, can be answered with reference to Marcel Answer Reich-Ranicki.

He also referred to his tears to underline the quality of a book. He judged Günter Grass' "In the crab", "I have cried, and I do not cry below my level". If you really want your book to be read, you now know what is important: tear glands have to be activated. The best is "sophisticated and dramatic".