Jacob Elordi, Margot Robbie and Alison Oliver stood in the rain at the UK premiere of "Wuthering Heights" this year, doing the usual run of red-carpet interviews about the film. One of the people waiting for them was Jack Edwards, a 27-year-old English content creator known online as "the internet's resident librarian," who had come with something else in mind: a personalised book recommendation for each of them, based on what he already knew about their reading tastes from earlier conversations.
Edwards began posting book review videos in 2016, while still a student at Durham University, and has since built an audience of more than 2.1 million subscribers on YouTube and roughly 3 million across TikTok, Instagram and Goodreads combined. In 2025 he was appointed literary editor of Esquire's UK edition, where he now writes a monthly book column, and in 2026 he was named to Time's list of the 100 most influential creators in the world.
From book reviews to celebrity interviews
Edwards' podcast, Inklings, pairs weekly interviews with authors, including George Saunders, Ocean Vuong and Douglas Stuart, with a monthly community book pick, and has also become a venue for conversations with actors and musicians about what they read. Guests have included Cillian Murphy, Jennifer Lawrence, Margot Robbie, Riz Ahmed and Steven Spielberg. In one recent episode, Edwards recommended the Icelandic novel "Independent People" to Murphy after learning the actor admired a different author's recommendations, a small, specific exchange that nonetheless drew significant engagement online.
A TikTok video Edwards made in 2024 about Dostoevsky's novella "White Nights" is credited with helping make it the fourth bestselling translated title in the UK that year, a shift substantial enough that Penguin Audio commissioned a new audiobook edition, narrated by the actor Luke Thompson, in response, according to Publishers Weekly. When Edwards launched Inklings as a standalone community book club in 2025, it attracted 46,000 members on Instagram and 26,000 on the reading platform Fable within its first ten days, and reached 75,000 members within a week, figures reported by Publishers Weekly at the time.
A crowded, and increasingly influential, field
Edwards is one of a growing number of public figures whose relationship with books has become central to how audiences understand them. Dua Lipa's Service95 Recommends, Reese Witherspoon's Reese's Book Club, Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf and Florence Welch's Between Two Books have each built substantial followings around monthly picks and public reading lists, part of a wider culture in which a celebrity's book recommendations are now treated as a legitimate piece of their public identity, visible in recurring features like Interview magazine's annual roundup of what its subjects are reading.
This surge in visible, personality-driven book culture has coincided with a broader recovery in the publishing industry. TikTok's BookTok community was credited with influencing 59 million print book sales in the United States in 2025 alone, generating an estimated $760 million in retail revenue, according to industry data compiled in the annual Publishing by the Numbers report. Independent bookshops, widely assumed a decade ago to be in terminal decline, grew by 70% in the United States between 2020 and 2025, from 1,916 stores to 3,218, according to the American Booksellers Association, with more than 600 new openings in 2025 against just 65 closures. In the UK, more than 195 million print books were sold in 2024, generating £1.82 billion, with fiction sales rising roughly 6% year on year, according to Nielsen BookData figures presented at the London Book Fair.
Booksellers describe online recommendation as free market intelligence, a signal of what to order before in-person demand arrives, a dynamic reported by the public radio programme Marketplace in coverage of the bookshop boom. Barnes & Noble has built dedicated in-store sections across its more than 600 locations for BookTok titles, and TikTok itself has partnered with the online retailer Bookshop.org, which redirects a share of its profits to independent stores, linking online book culture to the survival of physical books.
