Books, what wonderful sources of entertainment and knowledge. Majority of bookworms should be quite familiar with the ‘new book smell‘ after buying a book from the bookstore. Or that immediate curiosity that takes over when we find a doodle or message written inside a library book. Bookworms are also quite familiar with the overwhelming feeling of wanting to read everything on their shelves first, but then suddenly buying more books. Bookworms, even if they wish they could deny that last familiarity, can relate to all of this. Now just imagine these concepts and feelings exhibited through pictures! Introducing #bookstagram, where books meet photography on Instagram.
Bookstagram is an online book community where book lovers from all around the world come together to share their love of books through pictures. On bookstagram you can definitely find a captured moment of someone reading their first fantasy book, or their first book from a New York Times Bestselling Author, or a book that went out of print and was found at a yard sale. Bookstagram members capture all these moments and share them online. You can also find book recommendations on bookstagram and just aesthetically pleasing pictures.
Here are some of my favourite bookstagram accounts and my own!
However one of the biggest problems with bookstagram is that you tend to see the same books over and over again. These books also tend to be all white and not diverse at all. However, recently as a community we have tried to improve our consumption of books, by reading more diverse books and sharing pictures of them to recommend them to readers. This is because readers all deserve to see themselves in books and spoiler alert, readers aren’t all straight, abled bodied, cis, white boys. We need to showcase books with black girls who are badass and bisexual, books with people of colour (PoC) suffering from chronic pain but still killing it in school, books with non-binary warriors and so much more. We need diverse books and we need them now! Bookstagram has to boost these diverse books because readers deserve to see themselves in books. They deserve representation in books.
Bookstagram is also making great improvements on critiquing problematic books so readers can be aware about harmful rep. We need to protect our readers and show them that they can find books with characters like themselves in them that aren’t stereotypical.
So bookworms, if you’re looking for an online community where you can talk books and take pictures of books, join #bookstagram. You can fangirl, you can find recommendations and you can adore pictures of beautiful books that are aesthetically pleasing.
