Most of us don’t find books anymore. Books find us.

By Mishthi , Journalism Hons , 2nd Year

Edited and Designed by Mannat , Psychology Hons , 2nd Year.

We scroll, pause, save, add to cart. And somewhere in between a reel and a five-star review, a book quietly gets labelled good—not because we sat with it, argued with it, or loved it deeply, but because we saw it everywhere.

Algorithms don’t read books. They watch readers. They notice what makes us stop scrolling, what makes us cry on camera, what fits into a pretty stack with fairy lights. The more a book is shared, the more it feels important. Visibility slowly turns into value.

That’s why the same books keep coming back. They’re easy to pitch, easy to summarise, easy to feel. Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves very little room for books that are slow, strange, or unsure of themselves. The kind of books that don’t trend but linger and make an impact

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Publishing has noticed. Stories are wrapped in tropes, covers are designed for feeds, and risk feels unnecessary when familiarity sells. Again, this isn’t evil. It’s just… convenient. But convenience has a cost. Some voices get louder. Others barely get heard.

The strange part is how personal it all feels. Recommended for you. As if the algorithm knows your taste. But what it really knows is what worked for people like you before. And so your feed starts to look the same. Your reading list starts to feel safe.

Algorithms didn’t ruin reading. They just made it faster. And sometimes, reading isn’t meant to be fast. Sometimes, a book deserves time, silence, and a little resistance.

Maybe “good literature” isn’t what trends, but what stays—the book you think about days later, the line you didn’t screenshot, the story that didn’t go viral but quietly changed you.