In conversation with Jack Edwards, the internet's librarian

He's the most influential reader in Britain—and he's only 26

Ever since I saw the books blogger Jack Edwards interview the cast of One Day at the premiere last year, I’ve been curious to speak with him. Because not only is he eloquent, thoughtful and the most influential man in British books (if he recommends a book, it shifts) but he has built an extremely successful career in publishing solely through online media. I know this happens in beauty and fashion all the time—and has been happening for at least the last decade—but publishing is notoriously (adorably?) antiquated. Which makes his 3.7 million subscribers/followers/ readers across every conceivable platform—YouTube TikTok, Goodreads, Instagram, and now Substack, too—all the more impressive.

Jack’s lands are foreign to me; as a zonked millennial, I was desperate to know about what it’s like over there. I also wanted to pick his brains on romantasy, celebrity book clubs, the myth of being well-read, and The Salt Path fiasco. Plus, his favourite book/ most underrated book/ the book he did not finish, and whether or not he believe in the adage, “never trust a person who doesn’t read”. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Enjoy!

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Jack! I’ve been excited to speak to you. Because you have built this incredible community for something that is not, historically, a mass engagement subject. Save for a handful of books each year—like All Fours, The Paper Palace, Sorrow & Bliss—books don’t really go viral (they go indie viral, but not viral viral), because it requires people to have read it, in order to join in the convo. Quite frankly, publishers should all be clamouring to hire you. Talk to me a little bit about how you got started.

I started by emailing my local newspaper when I was a precocious 15-year-old being like, “Hi, I’ve written a review of Hunger Games, I think I’ve got your headline of the week”. To which they would reply, “Respectfully, no, but maybe you should start a blog.” That turned into a YouTube channel and that mutated into a TikTok account. I noticed that most books creators were following this model of ‘What I’m going to read in August; Read with me in August; What I read in August’ and so it was this insular thing that only existed within the month it took place—by October, people weren’t watching the August video anymore. I wanted to make something evergreen and to gameify it a bit: reading five romance books in five days; or trying out the dark academic aesthetic for a week.

I did this last year, when I read as many Colleen Hoover books as I could in a month. I actually didn’t mean to gameify it—I only put in plae a hard stop because otherwise, I knew myself, I’d have gone on till I’d read them all—but the ‘challenge’ element of it is what seemed to appeal to a lot of readers.

My early book videos were things like, ‘reading for 24 hours straight’, or ‘reading all the books that Connell studies in Normal People’. I would talk about the books that Harry Styles has recommended, or the books that Kendall Jenner has posted on Instagram, and those were the things that made my account go viral.

Were Kendall’s recs any good?

There were some bangers! There was a brilliant collection of horror stories by Amparo Dávila called The Houseguest. They all had very hipster covers. And then the other video I did was, I noticed you could buy a stack of ‘decorative books’ on Etsy, which are for aesthetic value only, they’re bundled by colour, and so I bought a green stack and decided to read all of them. As I was uploading it, I was thinking, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever made.

It’s not, it’s excellent, I approve. You do set yourself mad targets though—like when you reviewed 116 books that you’d read in 2024 in one sentence. Does that take mammoth amounts of prep?

Yes. I log everything, which helps. I love Storygraph, I love Goodreads, I am currently moving onto Fable, which has more of a book club focus. My goal is to start a conversation, or contribute to it, and then let it run onwards and let other people add their discourse.

In that video you made about the 116 books you had read that year you said of the volume, “That’s unhinged, that’s not a sign of mental wellness”. That’s something I find myself saying a lot to people when they say, “How do you find the time to read” or, “I wish I read this much”. My response is a) you can always find the time to do something you’re obsessed with (like people who get up at 4am to work out, or who cook a nice dinner every single night), but b) I’m not saying it’s aspirational to read this much! Life should be balanced!

I get asked about it a lot. And there are people who will suggest I am pretending to read the books. If I was going to pretend to do something, do you not think I would choose a more lucrative industry to pretend in? Somewhere there’s a bit more money in the marketing!? I don’t think you can read too much. But also, I am not suggesting that you are not a true reader if you haven’t read this number of books in a year. If you read one book, you are a reader. I never want to contribute to the snobbery that can exist around reading and so I always contextualise my reading: I’m able to read this much because I’ve made it a commercial endeavour. It’s literally my job to read this much.

Do you plan in advance what you read?

I’m pretty intentional. I try to do a mix of contemporary and classic and I don’t usually read proofs until two weeks before the book comes out, because it can contribute to the idea of gatekeeping: talking about books when they aren’t out yet. I like to share views once there is already a conversation happening. The reality is—and there is no way of saying this without sounding like a knob—because I have a lot of followers on Goodreads, just by nature of my recommending it, my review will look like the top review. And that isn’t because my review is the best review; it’s based on a social algorithm, rather than a content algorithm. So those people liking the review may not have read the book, but they’re still pushing my review to the top of the rankings. So I will wait until there is a holistic amount of discourse around a book before contributing it. If it’s a new book or a debut, and I didn’t enjoy it, I don’t want to prevent people from having their own experience first.

That’s a thoughtful approach. Where do you have the most influence?

Goodreads. But YouTube is my favourite platform. The community building is so special. People can really get to know you. TikTok is trickier, because there are so many superlatives! You can’t do a lukewarm review on TikTok, and one of the most important parts of literary criticism is nuance. I don’t go into any book looking to trash it. I don’t want to be that person. I would always question why I didn’t enjoy that thing.

I don’t mind not ‘getting’ a book. I don’t think everything should be for everyone. I wrote recently about how I DNF Orbital, for instance, which is a book tons of people absolutely love.

Yes, and not liking something still opens a discourse, or a conversation. People can share their take. For example my rebuttal to you on Orbital is that the book felt like an antidote to the division we are experiencing in the world: it showed these people in this neutralised environment where they were all equals.

Yeah, I can see that. How do you feel about The Salt Path fiasco?

I’m gutted for my mum, as it’s her favourite book. She’s in a state of mourning. I can empathise with the sense of something being lost.

A part of the conversation I found quite dispiriting is when people used it as an excuse to go, “Well, I never liked it anyway”. That’s irrelevant. That’s something I found so interesting about Colleen Hoover—and why I wanted to read her—is that she’s fantastically popular and people are incredibly rude about her. (To an extent, this always happens when things are insanely popular.)

One thing I would say about Colleen Hoover, is she’s a great storyteller. She really goes by Chekhov’s gun, which is if she has introduced something in Chapter 3, she will come back to it, and the payoff will be worth it. I don’t love her books, but I see value in them.

We’re in a ‘reading is hot’/ ‘book girl summer’ moment. The idea that they’re a trend is a bit weird, like when people say boobs are in fashion, or hips are in fashion, as if they go away when they are not. (I guess if you’re a Kardashian, they actually do.) But the book-sized tote bags, the caps, the clubs. Thoughts?

I think it’s joyful. If more people are getting into reading because their favourite celebrities are making book clubs—to me, that can only be a positive thing. It means they are being led down the path of being a reader. I loved when Pierpaola did a collection [at Valentino] inspired by Hanya Yanagihara. I liked when Helmut Lang did a show that featured Ocean Vuong’s poetry. I am obsessed with the Dior book totes. I loved Miu Miu handing out books in the street. These people are fundamentally storytellers. It makes absolute sense that there is crossover between the literary landscape and the fashion world, even if people may perceive them to be antithetical. But I do wish [the brands] would get the publishing industry involved. That’s when it can feel performative.

What do you think of the celebrity book clubs? Dakota, Kaia, Dua? Does everyone want to be Reese and Jenna?

I think a lot of people approach it with scepticism. And a lot of the scepticism is rooted in misogyny. There was an article about how Bella Hadid and Gigi Hadid were carrying books as a hot new accessory and I was like, have you considered for a second that they might actually be reading them!?

Kaia and Dua have very literary taste, I think people would expect them to be recommending romantasy (for the very reason you cite above) and it’s like, Olga Tokarczuk, George Saunders, Virginie Despentes. A lot of obscure books in translation.

I love Dua’s book club. We have very similar tastes. I’ve actually just launched my own club, Inklings. Our first book is Evenings and Weekends by Oisín Mckenna, who I adore. The book is a love letter to London, with a huge ensemble cast.

Congratulations! I really want to read that one, I’m going to join in. And you’ve also launched a Substack, too, called Constant Reader. I was so happy to see that your first letter was on one of my favourite books about motherhood, Soldier Sailor. Will you not get platform fatigue?

I didn’t have anywhere I could write longform reviews. My YouTube videos are only about two minutes per book, because if you talk about a book for longer than that, people get bored. And I wanted to have a platform where I could be thorough. It’s called Constant Reader in homage to Dorothy Parker’s column for The New Yorker. She wrote these scathing reviews, but she would celebrate literature as much as she would criticise it. I loved her belief in the betterment and the brilliance of writing. There’s also another element to it, where everything I do is for free—YouTube videos, TikToks, Instagram, my new book club—and I needed to find a way to fund that.

The access thing is a hard one to figure out. I am always told that I should put more of my work behind a paywall, as that that’s the point of Substack, but I want some of my work to always be free.

I’ve always wanted to make books as accessible as possible. The free content isn’t going anywhere. My Substack is in addition.

I know that when you pan a book, your engagement soars. Have you ever then met an author you’ve panned?

That’s the ultimate challenge. It starts as you in your room, reading in isolation, sharing your authentic thoughts. And I cannot lose that authenticity by worrying that I might be in a room with someone. I want to lead with kindness—I always talk about the art, not the artist. Rather than just saying ‘I hate a book’, I’d rather have a thought-provoking conversation. For instance, I read the new Hunger Games book and I mentioned that I didn’t enjoy the songs in the book (of which there are a lot.) A lot of people from the Appalachian region commented that District 12 alludes to Appalachia and that protest songs are an important part of their culture, and perhaps Suzanne [Collins] is paying homage to that.

I love that. So when we met recently at Hay festival, we were talking about covers. I was saying how I wish all books looked like French books, or Fitzcarraldo books, as I hate neon covers, it makes my bookshelves look really hectic, and I want my shelves to look calming and soothing! And you were saying how you have to buy US covers, for when you talk about a Fitzcarraldo book, as it doesn’t work online.

I, too, am against the highlighter cover. I am not a highlighter cover apologist. But I think uniqueness and ability to identify a cover is important, because it makes people feel like when they enter a book space—whether that’s a festival, or a library, or a shop—if there are things that they recognise and immediately identify, it removes that feeling of being an outsider. People being able to identify the book when it’s out in the wild is important. Or take those ‘100 Books of the Century’ type lists. You might not have read any, but you might recognise some of the covers, and that makes you feel included.

I have never read anything on those lists. Out of 100 I will have maybe read one or two books. I read a lot, but I don’t think I’m very well-read. Maybe ‘being well-read’ is just an illusion.