New literary prescribers: Spanish booktubers' sociodemographic features and self-perceptions

Abstract

The internet has led to the emergence of figures such as booktubers, a community of young people who upload videos on YouTube where they talk about books they are reading. This leads to envisage their activity as a new model of literary information and opinion with points in common with the function that has traditionally been associated to literary reviews and critics. By means of a mixed questionnaire addressed to booktubers, this work aims at systematizing the features characterising this figure in Spain; describing their perceptions about their activity, in particularly in relation to the one performed by professionals who write literary critics; and producing a list of Spanish booktubers that they themselves consider most influential. The findings enable to offer a profile of booktubers in Spain for the first time, lead to consider that these young people complement the traditional literary critic and offer a novel contribution: the first ranking of booktubers in Spain.