Part of what inspired me to start this blog was the tech world’s notion of the “Cosy Web”*; roughly, the idea that as more and more internet spaces are flooded with bots and adverts and AI slop and feeds full of ragebait that make us increasingly unhappy, we retreat to private online spaces, such as group chats, discord servers, newsletters and old-school blogging sites. This covers activities such as chatting to friends and family, reading and writing more long-form pieces (rather than shorter social media posts) and joining an online community of people who share your hobbies and interests. Reading about this theory of the internet led me to neocities, a sort of revival of early internet blog hosting site geocities, and clicking through random pages there, learning about people’s hobbies, projects, thoughts and passions, all presented in an array of late 90s and early y2k style, made me remember how the internet felt to me when I was young (reader, I am no longer young). The cosy web shies away from the doomscroll, from feeds full of slop content meant more for the algorithm than for you, and from passive consumption of pure content, and more towards active engagement with people and ideas, creativity and seeking out quality work made by people who care about it, or people having fun playing with ideas. While we can never truly be free from The Algorithm when we enter an online space, and our data is always being harvested in some form or another, these are spaces in which we at least have a degree of agency, and can behave as people rather than data points, and where we aren’t manipulated into clicking, posting or sharing out of a manufactured desire to feel relevant in spaces where attention is everything.

I wanted to make my own little contribution to this in the form of a blog about books and the publishing world, both because it’s the world I know best, and because as a book worker employed by a massive publishing company, I’d like to find a way to squeeze some meaning out of a job that feels increasingly meaningless. I’d like to create a cosy space for my own thoughts about books, outside the joint (and increasingly inseparable) forces of algorithms and capitalism.

I’d like to apply this model to books in two ways. The first relates to the online and how we can step back from the world of reading-as-consumption, done for the algorithmic eye and always demanding more and more output within a narrow algorithmic space which favours digestible tropes, pretty book covers and hyperbolic responses to what we read. The second is linked to the first, but relates to what we’re actually reading: moving away from churned out, pre-fab bestsellers created either specifically to do well within the algorithm (more on that below), or written under the gaze of and influenced by the algorithm, and retreat to quieter, more contemplative and perhaps less consumerist ways of reading.

I want to make it very clear before I dig in here, that I’m not interested in judging anyone for their reading and book-buying habits. I really enjoy books in a formulaic, increasingly churned-out genre I can only describe as “cosy gay witches”, and I enjoy them simply because they’re fun, easy and comforting in a hard world. That’s enough of a reason for me or for anyone to read something they enjoy without having to justify themselves. I also think it’s important to point out how gendered a lot of criticism of very popular fiction is, with large numbers of people continuing to be angry about anything enjoyed en masse by young women, and my angle, I hope, won’t contribute to this.

That said, I tend to think about my reading being myriad different activities depending on what I’m reading. Reading isn’t a monolithic activity, so much as a means to multiple different ends. When I read the third book in the Cosy Gay Witches series (will the cosy gay town come together to help the cosy gay witches save the Cosy Gay Teashop? Nail biting stuff), it doesn’t feel to me that I’m engaging in at all the same activity as when I read a substack article about data colonialism, or literary fiction, or popular non-fiction, or a book on the history of Palestine. The mechanism is always the same: my eyes move across a page – paper or web – and sends images of glyphs to my brain, which transforms these glyphs into words for me to process into information and narrative (or, alternatively, someone else transforms these glyphs into words for me to listen to). But sometimes my aim is to learn, sometimes it is to relax, sometimes it is to think deeply about the experience of being human; three different activities that utilise a shared mechanism. I feel that in our culture, reading is often understood as inherently good, as a moral end in and of itself, rather than a means. But if we can see reading as an umbrella term for a group of activities, I think we can see even more that this positioning is incorrect. I’m a reading enthusiast, but when I’m reading Cosy Gay Witches, I’m engaging in a leisure activity for pleasure, and not much else. There’s no essential moral value to what I’m doing and it’s no more automatically good than watching Shadow and Bone (to keep to the fantasy theme) on Netflix. Of course, it’s not bad, either. I don’t even think it’s neutral; I think it’s a type of reading that doesn’t really have anything to do with a moral position at all**.

Which is why I have my reservations about BookTok. If starting from a point of “Reading is Good”, then it seems straightforwardly positive that through BookTok, large numbers of mainly young women are reading voraciously. And again, I’m not here to dunk on those young women: it’s genuinely lovely that people are finding community online through a shared hobby. But it’s not good in any moral way. In fact, I worry that it might be bad – not the people talking about books with such love and enthusiasm, but the way this sincere enthusiasm ends up being exploited for profit.

I remember back in the earlier days of Amazon’s rise being thrilled with the algorithm that recommended me books. I’d look at a book on Amazon, and it would suggest other books I might enjoy, and it was pretty much always right. Even long after I stopped buying from Amazon, I’d still occasionally use it to find books on whatever subject was currently interesting me, clicking on the first search result it generated and then scrolling down to the “You Might Also Like” section to look at what else was out there (and then buying it elsewhere if it interested me). It’s been a while since I’ve done this, since Amazon is deep into the enshittification process and its recommendations have become mostly useless***. But its legacy still lives on, and I’d say that at least when it comes to books, Amazon is a grandparent of BookTok, both in its books-by-algorithm machinery and in its commodification of books.

It’s easy to see the good of BookTok: encouraging young people to read and fostering a sense of community and shared experience. But the flipside of that coin is consumerism driven by algorithms, targeted mainly at girls and young women. I’ve seen first hand how BookTok has shifted publishing since it skyrocketed during lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic. Fanfic writers whose works were mostly posted on A03 (a Cosy Web dream – though granted, sometimes an extremely horny dream – where various fandoms come together to share writing and art inspired by their favourite books, films, TV shows, videogames etc, all using open-source archiving software, and where nothing is monetised and commercial promotion is prohibited) and who have subsequently blown up on BookTok, alongside authors who have used TikTok to promote their self-published works and gained huge followings, are now very quickly signed by big publishing houses, eager to get in on the money to be made from social media hype. Granted, they do print books with often superior (if formulaic) cover designs, make deals with bookshops to get them face-up on tables or on Amazon’s front page and spend money on marketing books, which pushes the books out to new markets and readers, drives sales up and creates more revenue for those authors than they could have achieved on their own. While this is, of course, lovely for authors and I’m genuinely happy so many have been able to make a career from their writing through BookTok, it does strike me as a cynical move from the publishing world: these authors write, post, graft, market themselves and become names on BookTok, and then a publishing company sweeps in to collect a chunk of those spoils for themselves. In the case of people who originally posted their works on A03, the original posts are taken down (where the spirit of A03 is free access for everyone to works written out of love and enthusiasm, the publishing houses snapping these works up are out to make money and do not want free versions online eating in to their profits) and re-worked to remove obvious references to their source material (one can’t imagine JK Rowling, once famed for Harry Potter but now mostly known for being Totally Normal on X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, responding well to a fan-fiction of her work written by a non-binary author, being published by Penguin Random House).

Alongside this, publishing companies increasingly commission formulaic, trope-heavy books and churn them out with BookTok-ready covers. This is pure book-as-commodity, and if I’m cynical about publishers signing pre-existing BookTok authors, at least there’s an element of authenticity there, a degree of someone having put something into the world that they cared about creating, and that people loved enough to spread the word. It strikes me that publishing companies often want you to believe they exist to tell stories, give voices a platform, make the world better etc but their savvy harnessing of book-by-algorithm via commissioned authors being paid to write a book by using a checklist of popular tropes peels back the mask and shows a glimpse of an industry where the big players exist purely to make money.

These tropes are ideal digital data points in a way that originality and big ideas are not: enemies-to-lovers, friends-to-lovers, forced proximity (are the straights OK?), dark academia, grumpy/sunshine, cosy gay witches (I repeat: I am criticising this but I am not above it): all of these tell you at a glance what to expect from a book, and they tell the algorithm what to channel your way, and your engagement with the posts you interact with tells the publishing industry what to churn out more of. Big tech harvests your data, and publishing conglomerates use that data to sell your own digital output back to you.

If we are in any way worried about what AI means for the book industry (I’m mostly not, but that’s another post), then it bears some examining why this is. I can think of a long list of challenging, creative and original books – some but not all of which is lofty-minded literature – that AI could never have come up with or churned out based on a prompt. The same does not hold true of mass-produced, trope-heavy books: these are books-as-commodity in the purest form, and are ripe for being churned out by AI bots, packaged with covers that adhere to current aesthetic demands and marketed either under fake author names, or as part of an innovative AI-positive “author” collective with a cutesy name. It’s already algorithmic and repetitive in nature, there’s tonnes of it on the internet, and it would be pretty straightforward for an LLM to reproduce endless first drafts of these kinds of books. While I don’t think it will happen, it’s not in the realm of the fantastical to picture an office of underpaid young Londoners hired into the UK publishing industry with the tedious job of babysitting the AI, cleaning up what it spews out (at time of writing, unattended AI is not capable of creating something publishable on its own) and making it presentable for onward sale. AI or not, we’re seeing a market flooded with trope-slop to a degree that smothers the sincere and earnest enthusiasm for fantasy and romantasy that started the whole thing. And that’s really sad to think about.

I fear, then, that this creates a spiral effect, an algorithmic ouroboros of creation and consumption that fuels itself by churning out “aesthetic”, easily-summarised books to be displayed on BookTok along with hashtaggable tropes, bookshelves in the background with an array of pretty, brightly coloured spines and a request of “What should I read next?”. This question will be answered by “more of the same”. Through this mechanism, creators who started talking about books they loved and how those books made them feel, and even the authors who wrote those books, are exploited by massive conglomerate, multi-national media corporations who parasitise the original passion and authenticity of BookTok to make money. In return, they pour new, pre-fab BookTok books back into the algorithmic hype cycle to drive further sales, stripping away the very authenticity it relies on to make this money (and undercutting the authors who made it big in the first place).

If, as we’ve discussed, we don’t take reading as an automatic, inherent good, then this boils down to pure consumerism and corporate vampirism, feeding off an earnest reader base that was excited to find and connect with new authors who shared their enthusiasm. If these works of romance, fantasy and romantasy weren’t books but were Netflix shows, and we were instead discussing ‘FlixTok’, I don’t think people would be so eager to say “Well, it’s good that young people are watching shows for pleasure and engaging with each other about them”. I don’t think it would be particularly a bad thing (Netflix’s business practices aside), but I don’t think there’d be the same attempt to argue for its unshakeable goodness. If we can remove the moralising about the value of reading from the conversation, can we really say any of this is good?

For as long as it’s profitable, the machine will keep churning out slop, and I can see two possible outcomes: either the community grows sick and bored of the thing it loved so much once upon a time, or BookTokkers retreat to closed-off online spaces – discords, blogs etc as mentioned above – to enjoy their hobby away from slop-promoting algorithms.

I think it’ll be a mixture of the two: the people who were channeled into it just through the algorithm will peel off and find something else to love, and the die-hard enthusiasts who’ve been there from the very beginning will retreat back to A03 and the rest of the Cosy Web. I hope very deeply that I’m correct in the latter, because it would be a shame to let capitalism spoil all the fun. So here’s my plea: let’s copy the Cosy Web in the book world. Let’s have Cosy Reading. By this, I don’t mean snuggled up on the sofa with a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate (although I don’t not mean that either, that’s my plan for the rest of the afternoon). I mean hitting pause, slowing down and maybe even logging off sometimes. I would love to see BookTokkers move to slower-paced blogs, writing longer-form reviews, interviewing their favourite authors, and posting their own writing. I’d like to see a move away from goodreads and amazon and the rating of books out of 5 stars, and towards more nuanced ways of discussing themes, content, the quality of the writing, than just a simple, algorithmically-digestable rating (how many times have you avoided a book because it only had 3 stars, or loved a book that you later found out was poorly rated, or read something with 5 stars that you hated?). I’d like to see a move away from collecting special editions of BookTok books and bookshelves curated with social media in mind, and towards battered second-hand copies, the book your best mate lent you, and trips to the library. I want to read your review on a book blog of that book your mum said she loved when she was your age. Or I want you to write it in your journal and for you to have written it just for the joy of writing it. Get a group together, pick a theme for the month, each read something on it and then chat to each other about it, online or in meatspace. Make a zine about it. Start a group chat where you send your friends notes on weird, interesting stuff you’ve read, that cannot be summed up in stars. Buy a massive book and take your time with reading it. Read something that was published 20 years ago, or something weird you found in the charity shop. Swap books with your friends.

I think having spaces for our passions and hobbies online is a wonderful thing, and I think for most of us who aren’t super tech-savvy, there’s not really a way to engage with that without having our data collected and used for something. But I think we can slow that process down and refuse to deliver ourselves up for processing in digestable, algorithmically-aesthetic soundbites.