Gen Z Can Read, But Do We Get The Point?

If you walk into the nearest Barnes & Noble, there will be a table labeled “#BookTok” with the latest hyped books. Reading is cool and chic again, but does that mean we’re actually thinking critically? Gen Z thinks reading is cool, but literacy is getting harder.   

BookTok has changed the game for book discovery. Now more than ever, reading is visible, social and marketable. According to The Conversation, 66% of Gen Z identified as readers in 2025, up 14 percentage points since 2022. However, data on whether we’re actually reading more is conflicting. In a world constantly vying to monetize our attention, perhaps our ability to read as deeply as we once did is changing.   

Reading as identity, community and culture

BookTok, a subcommunity on TikTok, is a space where regular and aspiring readers can share reviews, hot takes, and recommendations while engaging in real-time conversations about books. Research from Radboud University states that BookTok lowers the barrier to entry for people who do not read frequently or feel neutral toward books because recommendations are based on vibe, emotion, and peer validation. 

I’ve found so much reading inspo from BookTok, sometimes even down to the most niche recommendations. I’ve found books I probably never would’ve stumbled across in a bookstore on my own. (I’m looking at you, Braiding Sweetgrass.)

In the attention economy, BookTok may give people the validation necessary to spend time on a book. The question of “What should I read?” has largely shifted from publishers, critics and booksellers toward algorithms and peer communities. According to a Publishers Association poll of more than 2,000 people ages 16 to 25, 59% said that BookTok or book influencers have helped them discover a passion for reading. Is BookTok as much a marketing phenomenon as a reading phenomenon?   

The culture of reading has also changed. To many of us, reading is broader than simply picking up a print novel or nonfiction book. Reading can be web novels, Substack articles, fanfiction, audiobooks and the list goes on. 

I’ve seen many events for silent-reading meetups and niche reading communities for those who have specific reading goals. I’ve watched bestselling authors like Sarah J. Maas appear on podcasts like Call Her Daddy, traditionally a space that wouldn’t be associated with literary criticism at all. This shows how reading and online communities have blended as the culture of reading is shaped by Gen Z. Traditional measures of reading may miss some of these postdigital reading practices, which allow readers to debate and interact with books across analog and digital platforms. 

the cult of performative readers

I’ve also seen how reading has become an aesthetic. There’s been tons of debate about performative readers online, inspiring deep-dive analysis through video essays. At one point, the fig tree analogy from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar blew up on TikTok. The passage resonated with people who felt overwhelmed by all the possible lives they could choose. But somewhere along the way, the fig tree also became part of an aesthetic of the “dark academia” girl, stereotyped as one who reads classic literature and listens to Ethel Cain. There’s nothing wrong with connecting with a book aesthetically, but flattening the complicated ideas in a text and reducing it to its “vibe” can take away from why it resonates in the first place.

There has even been discourse around some guys strategically reading certain books to appear safer and more desirable to girls. You know – the “performative men” who choose to read bell hooks and listen to Clairo. Using books to shape an identity isn’t the problem; people have been doing that for ages. The question is whether the identity stops at carrying the book or extends to actually allowing its ideas to challenge your perspective.

With so many options available, the attention economy hasn’t killed the practice of reading but has made reading better able to compete within it. But getting us excited to pick up a book is not the same thing as giving that book the sustained attention needed to understand and wrestle with it. 

the deep reading problem

In her August 2026 cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here,” The Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch argues that Americans are not forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, “they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.” 

This version of literacy requires us to sustain attention across longer texts and make larger connections. Deep reading requires more than simply completing a book. In a 2024 article from The Atlantic, Horowitch reported that professors at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities observed Gen Z students struggling to meet this standard. Some high schools are increasingly assigning excerpts rather than complete books because students struggle to sustain immersion in the text.   

A Wattpad-commissioned survey conducted by Wakefield Research found that 67% of Gen Z readers surveyed said they read on their phones for fun, compared with 51% of older generations. Yet, research from the E-READ Consortium found that young people showed stronger comprehension when reading the same material in print rather than on screens. Digital culture allows us to skim, read excerpts, get AI-generated summaries, and receive personalized algorithmic recommendations. Everything is optimized, streamlined, and efficient. I’ve heard many people say “It’s always those damn phones,” and honestly, REAL.  

Deep reading requires friction, whereas the media-driven world around us is built around reducing it. When people increasingly outsource the effort it takes to seek out what interests them on their own, wrestle with difficulty, boredom and uncertainty, and evaluate their own understanding, we lose individual expression, empathy, and our ability to solve abstract problems. How might we tackle larger problems in an increasingly distracting and simplified media environment?   

Online culture has helped expand reading into something more accessible, identity-driven, social and aesthetic. Maybe that means Gen Z is engaging with books and talking about reading more, but making reading into another facet of a demanding consumer culture doesn’t solve our ability to understand what we read. 

Our relationship with reading is changing, but what does that say about the types of readers we are becoming? How might these changes continue to affect our ability to deal with conflict, difficult emotions, complex people, and abstract problems?

• books
• BookTok
• culture critique
• entertainment
• Gen Z
• gen z culture