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Popular bookshop chain Waterstones claims young people are turning to books more than ever. Is this a sign of gen Z’s growing disillusionment with the digital world?
According to CEO James Daunt, Waterstone’s – the popular British bookstore chain – has seen sales up 5% in the past year. As a result, the retailer is set to open 10 new stores across the country, even as the high street continues to struggle elsewhere.
The key to Waterstones’ unlikely success? Young people are reading more.
‘People have come back to reading and buying books in bookshops as we have made a place which is an enjoyable and effective way to buy books,’ says Daunt.
As much as I appreciate Daunt’s dedication to his business, the uptick in young people’s reading habits isn’t entirely down to the hallowed shelves and cushy reading corners of Waterstones’ many locations. Gen Z are increasingly turning to physical books as an escape from a highly digitised world.
As Chloe Mac Donnell wrote for The Guardian, the sale of physical books in the UK has exploded in the past few years. Libraries are also reporting an uptick in its gen Z users, who are favouring these quiet spaces over noisy coffee shops.
‘43% of gen z and millennials don’t identify as readers,’ says Aliana Demopoulos, ‘but about half of those non-readers still visited their local library in the past year. […] Libraries have never been just about books. These are community hubs, places to connect and discover.’
Bookshops like Waterstones’ function in a similar way for young people who want to escape the influx of screens they’re forced to encounter on a daily basis – not just at work, but at home and through the omnipotence of a smart phone.
Ironically, it’s social media that’s been a big driver of this shift. ‘Book-tok’, the online community dedicated to sharing literary recommendations, has ballooned amongst gen Z and millennials – introducing a broader range of books to a diverse subsection of people.
‘The gen Z book sphere is incredibly broad,’ says Hali Brown, a 28-year-old co-founder of popular TikTok account Books on the Bedside. ‘There is a lot of appreciation for literary fiction, memoirs, translated fiction and classics in particular.’
As is the case with many things, social media is a powerful tool for democratizing access to a certain activity or subject. Reading, it seems, is no different. Suddenly millions of people have a space in which to discover new books they may otherwise have never stumbled across, as well as a platform through which to discuss them with likeminded people.
‘[Young people] want to do something not staring at a screen and relatively inexpensive,’ says Daunt. ‘Once people start collecting books they just buy more. BookTok is an easy label to put on it, but this is about people wanting to read and talk about books.’
