New Influencers: Who’s Telling us What to Read?

The literary critic is having to compete with new influencers: booktubers, bloggers, media figures, writers and, most of all, readers. Websites and blogs that list comments, recommendations and reviews about books have more followers every day, suggest reading matter and talk on the Internet. Readers have taken over the spaces traditionally reserved for journalists and critics. How are these new influencers helping to revitalise the book market, and who has book cred? New forms of collective plural empowerment raise another question: are readers and bloggers shifting the elitism of the book sector?