From BookTok to Brunch Clubs: HootPerch Launches Globally to Fuel the Worldwide Book Club Boom

A new reading companion app arrives just as book clubs become the defining social scene of the decade, cutting across age, gender, geography and genre.

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Something unusual is happening in a world that was supposed to have stopped reading: people are gathering, in numbers, to talk about books. They're meeting in breweries, on group runs, in cafés, at dating nights, in Zoom rooms, in WhatsApp threads, and in comment sections under TikTok videos tagged #BookTok - a hashtag that has now passed 220 billion views and become, as researchers have begun calling it, the largest book club in human history.

Book club events in the United States grew by 24% in a single year, according to Eventbrite data. Pew Research has found that roughly one in three American adults now takes part in some form of book club, with younger generations leading the charge. Independent bookstores - long written off as a dying breed - are opening again, with more than 250 new indie shops launching in a single year. Silent reading clubs, romance reading nights, feminist literature circles, thriller groups, audiobook meetups and celebrity-led clubs from Reese Witherspoon to Dua Lipa to Emma Watson are all quietly reshaping what "being a reader" looks like in the 2020s.

What makes this moment different is who is showing up. The stereotype of the book club - middle-aged women, living rooms, wine and crackers - has been quietly retired. Today's reading communities are, by nature, ungovernable by demographics: a twenty-year-old in Lagos and a sixty-year-old in Lisbon can meet in the same Discord server at midnight to argue about the same novel. A teenage boy in Manila and a retired teacher in Manchester can sit on opposite ends of the same BookTok comment thread and agree, for once, on something. Book clubs have become one of the last remaining spaces on the internet where age, gender, location and genre are not the point - the book is.

Into that moment steps HootPerch, a new reading companion app launching internationally on iOS and Android, designed specifically for the way this new, global reading culture actually behaves.

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Built for the way book clubs actually read

HootPerch is not a social network. It doesn't try to replace the group chat or compete with the Zoom call. Instead, it sits in the background of a reader's life and gives them something every book club member secretly needs: a way to remember what they read, feel something honest about it, and bring something substantive to the next conversation.

Readers can build a personal bookshelf across four living states ( To Read, Reading, Finished, and Abandoned), log their progress by page, and rate books using an emotional vocabulary that goes far beyond five stars. Did the book feel inspiring, lovely, amazing, emotional, boring, or did it just plain suck? These are the words book clubs actually use. HootPerch took them seriously.

When a reader finishes a book, HootPerch offers an optional 25-question reflection challenge - 20 seconds per question, scored on accuracy and speed - that translates into a playful animal totem: a Frog, a Tiger, a Bear, a Giraffe. It's the kind of thing made to be screenshotted and dropped into a group chat the moment you close the back cover. A book club night suddenly has a conversation starter before anyone has even poured the wine.

Other features include a "Book Wizard" that recommends titles based on mood, pace, genre, or even occasion (Christmas, Valentine's, seasonal), barcode and cover scanning to add books in seconds, shared-friendly achievement milestones like Branch Hopper, Nest Builder and Feather Collector, and a private statistics dashboard that tracks genre preferences, formats, authors and pages read over time - the kind of data that turns casual reading into the texture of a personal identity.

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The brain behind HootPerch

HootPerch is the brainchild of Babajide Aroyewun, a lifelong reader who spent years watching the same strange pattern play out in friendship circles around him: people who loved reading, people who wanted to talk about what they read, and no tool that quite met them in the middle. His own book clubs lived in fragments - a thread on WhatsApp here, a spreadsheet there, a half-remembered recommendation from a friend whose name he'd forgotten, a Goodreads account he hadn't opened in two years.

The apps he tried were either too serious (built for librarians and data hoarders) or too shallow (built for five-star ratings and nothing else). Meanwhile, the book clubs around him kept growing - spanning continents, time zones, and generations - and kept asking the same two questions at the start of every meeting: "What did you actually think?" and "What should I read next?"

Babajide built HootPerch to answer both. Not as a publisher's tool, not as a classroom tool, and not as another social feed begging for attention but as a quiet, playful perch where a reader anywhere in the world can keep track of what they've read, feel something true about it, and show up to their next book club (online, offline, or in a group chat at 2am) with something worth saying.

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Why the timing matters

Researchers studying the book club revival consistently point to the same underlying hunger: after years of algorithmic isolation and endless scrolling, people want slower, deeper, more human connections - and books, it turns out, are one of the last artifacts left that reliably create them. BookTok alone has been credited with reviving entire backlists, sending decade-old novels back onto bestseller charts, and introducing millions of young people to reading for the first time.

But the infrastructure around this cultural shift has been thin. Book club organisers still lean on spreadsheets, group chats, and memory. HootPerch is designed to be the companion this community has been quietly improvising around.

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Availability

HootPerch is available now as a free download on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for readers worldwide. A free tier includes reading tracking, personal bookshelves, recommendations, and up to 8 reading challenges per month. A premium plan unlocks unlimited books, more challenges, and the "Owl Wizard" mood-based recommender for readers who want to go deeper.

Whether you run a 30-person Zoom club, a three-person brunch group, or you're just the one friend who should have started a book club by now.

HootPerch is built for you.

For more information, visit www.hootperch.co or follow across all its social channels.

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HootPerch is an AI-powered reading platform that helps readers engage more deeply with books through guided questions, comprehension insights, and personalized recommendations. Designed for individuals, book clubs, and learning communities, HootPerch transforms reading into a more interactive, reflective, and rewarding experience.

This release was published on openPR.