TikTok now pivoting to books

Today, in "Stories that made us read the portmanteau 'romantasy' and make our brains treat it like English" news: TikTok's printing books now. Like, the paper things. With the covers? John Wick killed a guy with one, once.

Anyway, this is per The Guardian, which reports that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns and operates the video-based social media service, is getting into the book publishing business, focused primarily on titles in genres close to the center of the "BookTok" subculture that flourishes on the service. The company previously published e-books, but has now decided that the market will support physical titles, too, with the first such novel chosen for publication being Caitlin Cross' On Screen & Off Again, about two childhood friends who starred on a TV show together as children reconnecting in their young adulthood, and, yep, we can already see that ticking a lot of boxes.

We might gently poke fun at the TikTok crowd, but book recommendations have become a huge part of the service's appeal over the last few years: BookTok took off during the early months of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and hasn't really slowed down since. A report from a year ago stated that there were roughly 60 billion videos tagged with the #BookTok label on the site, and the trend's influence on actual book sales has been pronounced. No wonder that ByteDance wants to wet its beak by cutting out the middleman, even if it does involve actually messing around with physical objects like messy ink and paper. (As an added bonus, it's not like the U.S. government, which has been pissed at the company for years over allegations that it was doing nefarious things with all the personal information Americans broadcast directly down its throat every single second of every single day, is going to turn around and start banning books, right?)

(Uh, right?)