We are conducting a survey on book reviewers on Instagram. We want to learn how ordinary readers present, interpret, evaluate and recommend books to others in posts labelled as #bookreviews, as part of (or apart from) the global book community #Bookstagram. We hope you can help us understand this phenomenon better!

The aim of the study is to survey the background, motivations, objectives and strategies of Instagram reviewers, to better understand how ordinary book reviewers conduct reviewing. We are making this survey to capture dimensions that cannot be gained by solely looking at images or reading texts on Instagram. We will not reveal any information concerning personal details of individual users but all respondents will remain anonymous. We will report the results at a general level in a scientific article to be published in a media and communications research journal.

The study is lead and coordinated by Maarit Jaakkola, PhD, Associate Professor and Co-Director at the Centre for Nordic Media Research Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Team members include the research assistants Neha Sharma and Haitham Othman.

For any inquiries, you can contact Maarit (maarit.jaakkola@gu.se) or DM us on Instagram (@bookstagramresearch).

The study is related to a larger research topic that examines reviews in social media, the so called vernacular reviewing. Academic literature previously published on vernacular reviewing include the following:

Jaakkola, Maarit (2020, forthcoming). ”Useful creativity: Vernacular reviewing on the video-sharing platform Vimeo.” Culture Unbound.

Jaakkola, Maarit (2019). ”From vernacularized commercialism to kidbait: Toy review videos on YouTube and the problematics of the mash-up genre.” Journal of Children and Media, published online before print 18 November 2019.

Jaakkola, Maarit (2019). “From re-viewers to me-viewers: The #Bookstagram review sphere on Instagram and the uses of the perceived platform and genre affordances.” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture10(1–2), 91–110.

Jaakkola, Maarit (2018). “Vernacular reviews as a form of co-consumption: The user-generated review videos on YouTube.” MedieKultur – Journal of Media and Communication Research 34:65, 10–30.