A young woman holds up a book and smiles. "This is day one of me reading "The Song of Achilles' , " she says. The video jumps forward. "And this", she cries, her face stained with tears, "is me finishing it. "
A new form of literary criticism is boosting sales of books. This is BookTok, as the literary wing of the app TikTok is known. Imagine the emotional pitch of a Victorian melodrama, add music, and you have the general idea. BookTok is passionate. It is also profitable—at least for publishers.
Bloomsbury, a publishing house based in Britain, recently reported record sales and a 220% rise in profits, which Nigel Newton, its boss, put down partly to the"absolute phenomenon"of BookTok. On Amazon, BookTok is so influential that it has leapt into the titles of books themselves. The novel "It Ends With Us", for instance, is now listed as "It Ends With Us: TikTok made me buy it!" Evidently, TikTok did a good job: the romance is riding high in the top 100 in both Britain and America.
At the same time, BookTok pushes back against publishing amnesia（失忆症）. Books are imagined to award immortality （不朽） to authors—to be a "monument more lasting than bronze", as the Roman poet Horace wrote-but the lifespan of most is extremely short. Dig out a list of bestsellers from 20 years ago: not only are today's readers unlikely to buy them, most won't have heard of them.
BookTok is reviving backlists. One reason published it, says Philip Gwyn Jones of Picador, a British publishing house, was that, under its influence, old titles were creeping back into the bestseller charts. It offers such books "a second life", and he applauds it. "Eventually, a great book finds its readers, " Mr. Gwyn Jones says. "You just have to hope that, unlike Kafka, authors don't have to die before that happens. "Start trending on BookTok, and they won't.
