When Andrea Kossmann does a video blog about a sad book she’s just read, she often starts crying.
The 46-year-old clerk — whose big black-rimmed eyeglasses and punky quiff give her the look of a librarian you could have fun with — talks on YouTube about books that grab her.
She has already uploaded about 250 book reviews on the US-based video-sharing website, attracting a total of some 2.5 million views.
When she started her channel Kossis Welt (“Kossi’s World”) in 2009, she was one of the first Germans to BookTube, joining a vibrant community of people on YouTube who “vlog,” or video-blog, about books.
Search YouTube for “BookTube” and you’ll be offered nearly 6,000 channels, many of them aimed at young-adult readers. Big names include Christine Riccio of the United States (a quarter million subscribers) and Catriona “Little Book Owl” of Australia.
The proud land of Gutenberg doesn’t yet have anyone boasting their scale of fame.
Industry insiders put the current number of German BookTubers at “over three figures.” German-language “stars” like Peachgalore have around 70,000 subscribers.
Most BookTubers don’t hold forth solely on books, but revolve the conversation around the three C’s: cosmetics, cooking and cats. Books are often an afterthought. 
Some of the vlogs are just embarrassing to watch. Occasionally a teen will brightly hold a newly acquired book up to the camera — still sealed in plastic wrapping and unread. This kind of literary presentation is known as a “book haul,” a subform of the haul video in which young women exhibit their latest fashion or food purchases to the world.
Or the vlogger, usually not old enough to vote, will point the camera at her bedroom bookshelf and say something like, “I haven’t read this yet, but it’s got such a pretty pink cover. It’s a really cute book.”
A critique on the order of “super funny” is comparatively profound.
A German BookTuber called Christelle recently defended her colleagues against accusations of superficiality.
No one should expect lofty literary criticism on YouTube, she said, noting that she didn’t turn to book-review sections of august weekly or daily newspapers when she wanted a book tip — she asked her best girlfriend.
The kind of books discussed by professional critics are too demanding for her, said Christelle, who professed, “When I read, I want to relax and have fun.”
Newspapers of record review the works of Nobel Literature Prize contenders and Pulitzer Prize winners, but who’s to judge what’s top or a flop in the reading fare of the masses — history tomes, fantasy fiction, pulp page-turners, etc.?
This niche is occupied — not with astute analysis but with gut feeling — by BookTubers, whose onscreen likeability and head-waving trumps their academic qualifications.
Frank Krings, the Frankfurt Book Fair’s spokesman for social media, said publishers were keenly interested in YouTube because it “immediately has high penetration and reaches target groups inaccessible through conventional marketing instruments.”
Penguin Random House, the New York City-based and Anglo-German-owned giant of global trade publishing, has set up an internet portal at its German unit to attract people who blog about books or audio-books.
“(YouTube) has definitely got to be taken seriously,” Krings said.
Some BookTubers earn money by reviewing. Their channel has a “buy button” hyperlinked to an online vendor that pays a commission for every book ordered. Plus they get a share of the revenues from advertising on the channel.
“It won’t make you rich, but that was never my intention,” Kossmann remarked.
She said she spent about 10 hours a month on her videos and usually shot them for books she really liked. Some of her reviews are video-less.
“In a video I can better get across my enthusiasm and show more emotion. BookTube shouldn’t be stiff as a poker. Who wants to see prim and proper YouTube people on the screen at home and maybe be bored to death by them?” Kossmann said, adding that she neither edited her videos nor reshot them, because, as she put it, “I want to be authentic.”
She’s not averse to a personal makeover, though.
Older videos show her with ho-hum eyeglasses, a fleshy face and droopy hairdo. Like a librarian you couldn’t have had any fun with. —DPA