Readers are motivated by the thematic messages as well as the emotional, personal, political, and social feelings and thoughts books express. The paper mirrors allow us to see ourselves for who we are, who we aren't, and who we could be.
Reading is fundamental, emphasis on "fun" and "mental." The intersection of learning and enjoying is a process that is presented in the form of educational entertainment or the popular portmanteau, edutainment.
BookTube is edutainment that shows the love of reading through bookish banter and thoughtful consideration for the reading community. It's an extended book club that is more inclusive than a normal book club with an occupancy limit would allow.
Size isn't the issue however, it's the potential, pique, and perpetual curiosity BookTube brings. Viewers of BookTube are readers and each BookTuber has a different personality to meet the personality of the books they read.
Some BookTubers are more comedic than others while others take an open discussion approach. For BookTube, curiosity and information hangs in the balance. A reader who sees a parody of a book they read will get the sense of humor better than someone who has never read it.
Curiosity may remain but information is lost in translation. On the contrary, someone who read a book may be waiting for the punchline. The information is there but the curiosity is not humored or light on the mind.
To be curious is to be an open-minded individual with interests and to seek information is to be a focused intellectual with research. The problem with BookTube, and with edutainment, is that audiences are weighted in favor of entertaining or in favor of educating. A mixed audience who has the passion but also the necessity to learn is hard to please and provide for.
What is edutainment doing to strike the balance? Does entertainment provide little information or no information at all? Should education be strictly information-based or can education be entertaining?
Ariel Bissett is a Canadian BookTuber who asks these questions to learn the value of edutainment. Rather than her videos being exclusively Book Hauls (a purchase of more than one book at a time or a monthly subscription box of books) and Book Tags (Book related video responses requested by other BookTubers), her channel is organized into Writing, Book Discussions, and Book Reviews categories as well.
In her video below, she discusses the fine line between educating at the expense of entertaining and vice versa with scholarly research and fellow BookTubers.
After watching it, I found a new appreciation for the BookTube community. I had always thought of BookTubers as readers who forced, rather than made, reading fun. Then I found BookTubers who were more flexible, but not as comical as they were ironic, with their BookTube videos. Like the old adage goes, you can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a BookTube channel by its videos.
Like any BookTuber, it's just like finding a good book to read. What a "good book" for you may not be "good" to me, and that's okay. Sometimes to find that one good book, it takes some reading between the lines, and in this case, lines of ones and zeros.
