Reading beats doomscrolling

BookTube creators are turning reading into an explicit alternative to doomscrolling, framing books as a replacement for compulsive scrolling rather than just another hobby. (youtube.com, merriam-webster.com) In a video posted April 20, 2026, Dutch creator The Book Leo published “books i recently read instead of doomscrolling,” telling viewers she had been reading through recent months and tracking titles with a “book tree.” The video showed 686,000 subscribers and 4,634 views within hours of posting. (youtube.com) Two days earlier, another BookTube creator posted “7 Years on BookTube… Let’s Talk About It ⁉️,” using a seven-year anniversary video to reflect on long-form book content on YouTube at a moment when short-form feeds dominate much of online attention. The video page was indexed on April 18, 2026. (youtube.com) On the same day as Leo’s upload, Oslo-based creator The Book Castle posted “Book Purge #8,” the latest entry in a purge series that YouTube’s indexed playlist shows has run from 2019 through 2026. Purge videos center on removing unread or unwanted books from a backlog, turning curation into part of the reading habit. (youtube.com, youtube.com) BookTube is the book-focused corner of YouTube, with videos built around reviews, reading vlogs, hauls and tags rather than rapid-fire clips. Book Riot traced the community’s rise to around 2010, and Wikipedia describes it as a literature-focused subcommunity with hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide. (bookriot.com, wikipedia.org) “Doomscrolling” now has a formal dictionary entry for spending excessive time scrolling through upsetting online content, a term Merriam-Webster last revised on February 24, 2026. That vocabulary gives creators a ready-made contrast: infinite feeds on one side, finite books on the other. (merriam-webster.com) The advice in these videos is practical rather than abstract: keep a book nearby, swap a scrolling window for a chapter, and cut down a personal backlog so the next read is easier to pick. The Book Castle’s purge format and Leo’s reading log both turn that advice into visible routines. (youtube.com, youtube.com) The idea is spreading beyond a single channel. Penguin Random House posted a March 2026 video called “Things To Do Instead of Doomscrolling - Libraries, Audiobooks, Reading,” and other recent YouTube uploads have used nearly identical “read instead of doomscrolling” language. (youtube.com, youtube.com, youtube.com) What these creators are selling is not just a list of books but a different use of screen time: one tab closed, one book opened, one shelf edited down. On BookTube in April 2026, reading is being pitched as a deliberate substitute for the scroll. (youtube.com, youtube.com, youtube.com)