Read on Twitter
I'm in the middle of a massive unhaul project so I've been thinking about consumerism in BookTube a heck of a lot lately. This is a topic that cycles around in the community and for good reason: how we acquire books is a big part of what we do. https://bit.ly/3m7bzEU
As with most things we hot take on Twitter, there is so much nuance here and it's not as simple as "it's my money nobody judge me" or "buying books is awful how could you."
Everyone has to decide how to curate their own collection and how they spend their limited resources, but we also can't entirely divorce the role of BookTube and community norms from that. It's a worthwhile conversation.
Access to books is one of the biggest barriers to entry to reading communities. A level down from that, we are all contributing to this idea that a collection of books is part of BookTube, part of the aesthetic, part of the content we make. That is also a barrier.
The answer to what access we have to books also adds so much nuance to this conversation. I love my local library, but I have access to an excellent library system. I'm trying to divest from Amazon, but I'm not made of money. It's difficult because I buy what I can afford.
We don't owe an audience a say in how we spend our resources, but we are also often times inviting them to look in on these decisions. If I truly didn't want people to say stuff about my massive unhaul... I wouldn't have made any videos...
And trust me, I know people can get shady and overfamiliar. One extreme is an audience demanding receipts and questioning how we pay our bills, but the other is never being able to talk about this aspect of BookTube because it's my money and I do what I want.
Anyway, I'm thinking SO MUCH about how I ended up with all these books I don't want to read, actually. And it would be dishonest of me to say that BookTube wasn't a huge part of it.
You can tell I'm in the middle of @BookNetFest season too because every discussion I come across I'm like well, hmm, there are layers here, let's discuss in 7-10 parts.
