Reading the Room: What Brands Can Learn from Today’s Digital Reading Communities

Ella Walton, senior marketing and new business manager at the world’s leading passions agency, M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment

It’s World Book Day.

Gruffalos, Big Friendly Giants and Tigers (the ones that came to tea) fill classrooms, while library doors fling wide, and bookshops bask in the spotlight.

The occasion is recognised by over 100 countries across the globe, on a mission to change lives through a love of reading.

But in today’s digital age, World Book Day doesn’t just live and breathe in primary school assembly halls. Digital reading communities, social media platforms and celebrity book clubs have become new characters in the story in recent years.

The pandemic sparked a renaissance of reading, inspiring many to return to one of life’s more simple pleasures and spotlighting reading communities as points of connection in a time of separation.

Counter to predictions made when eBooks first entered the market, suggesting the paperback days were numbered, recent data from Kantar shows that, in fact, the literary market is healthy, with 2.3% growth year-on-year[1].

So, if reading isn’t going anywhere, what can we learn from today’s growing literary communities, and where lies the opportunity for brands and retailers to remain at the heart of the story?

Reaching the Reading Community

Gathering over 126 billion views, #BookTok, TikTok’s book-loving corner of the internet is a huge and growing online subcommunity. Like Instagram’s #bookstagram and YouTube’s #booktube, the platform is filled with young creators’ favourite titles, forming an online home for literary conversation.

Meanwhile, celebrity book clubs have increased in cultural influence, organically growing enormous networks of diverse readers and garnering recommendations from around the world. Arguably pioneered by Oprah, who launched her famous Oprah’s Book Club in 1996, the online reading community is a growing social hub of significant influence. It is a powerful collective, unique in its capacity to unite diverse demographics, while thriving at a cross-section of passions that is almost impossible to manufacture.

Take Reese Witherspoon, for example, whose platform, ‘Reese’s Book Club’, is followed by over 2.8M on Instagram. Witherspoon is an icon (and influencer) in film, media, and production, she is a mother and entrepreneur, a vocal advocate for gender equality, and now, the voice of reading recommendations to millions, globally. Her voice is an authoritative one and her influence now sees her raising the profile of women at the centre of the story, not just on screens but on bookshelves too.

The fan community that follows her epitomises the audience these modern literary collectives create. This might be a ‘book club’ by name, but beneath the surface, this is a community that has a significant say in setting the agenda for the stories we read, promote, tell, and retell, and it’s one that brands should be aware of.

Reading the (virtual) Room

Beyond its social impact, today’s modern and digital readership wields significant commercial power too.

Highstreet bookshops including Waterstones now assemble #Booktok stands, and as Bea Carvalho, Head of Fiction at the leading literary retailer makes clear, when it comes to celebrity endorsement of literature, ‘there is a net benefit for the publishing industry’[2]. 

In a poll conducted by the Publishers Association, 59% of 16–25-year-olds reported that #BookTok or book influencers “helped them discover a passion for reading”, while 68% said the online subcommunity had inspired them to read a book that they would have never considered otherwise[3].

For brands, literature also forms the basis for some of the biggest entertainment commodities in film and TV. It remains the original storytelling medium and the origin of some of entertainment’s largest fan communities in the world.

While, as with all online platforms, #BookTok has its challenges, like monitoring age appropriate recommendations for teens, it does have the potential to influence the reading habits of a generation, encouraging the critique of ideas and narratives, as opposed to people, which social media so often facilitates.

Bringing Everyone Along for the Ride

Reading has, and perhaps always will be, a largely personal and independent passion. While communities and book clubs bring socialising to the mix, reading per se, is often a solo game.

Naturally, then, reading preferences are largely personal too. When we read something brilliant, we become an advocate, a walking, talking marketing machine. 

We give our best recommendations to friends and gift them from our shelves to those we think would share our love for a particular read. 

It’s why so many of us line our walls, literally decorating our homes, with galleries of the books we’ve read. It’s why readers are often sceptical of film adaptations of their favourite tales, proudly declaring at the end of a viewing that ‘it wasn’t as good as the book’.

So what? Well, what we know of consumer behaviour is that people are, and will always be, most engaged by the things they love. And reading is no exception. Literary communities are ripe with opportunity for brands. Literary entities are often overlooked when it comes to partnership spend at the preference of on-screen adaptations, but the growing influence of reading communities forms an ever-growing audience for brands to reach.

Authenticity Reigns

Perhaps the biggest learning we can take from this growing online community is that authenticity reigns.

What we know of social trends, communities and platforms is that people follow what they love.

A small social spark can spread like wildfire. And for one of the world’s original passions, reading is right now alight with attention.

Today’s reading audience, online, or otherwise, is built from trusted voices and human connections and when it functions at its best it has the power to influence the stories that fill our minds, coffee queues, conversations, and ultimately our attitudes and outlooks.

It might be the oldest trick in the book, but if today’s digital reading communities can teach us anything, perhaps it’s that authenticity remains the key to the stories we tell to and about each other.

How the publishing industry holds true to authenticity in our increasingly ‘artificially intelligent’ world will be a trend worth watching. 

But hey, that’s a story for another time.