I know there has been a bit of drama in the past between select book bloggers and select Booktubers. This isn’t actually a post about a particular prejudice I have against Booktube. It’s really a post about why I don’t watch videos online at all: news videos, Buzzfeed videos, how to troubleshoot my laptop videos, etc. (Exceptions made for adorable cat videos, which I will watch at any time. Send me links!) But Pages Unbound is a book blog, so I’m sure you don’t care about whether I watch videos on CNN or read their articles; you want to know whether I’d rather read about book hauls or watch them, so here you go:
It’s simply much faster for me to read.
Watching a book haul on Youtube could take me upwards of ten minutes, while looking at someone’s book haul on their blog could take me less than one minute. If there’s a photo of the book haul, I can take five seconds to glance at that photo and see whether I’m interested in reading more about the books. If not, I’m done and can move onto reading someone else’s blog. If yes, I can finish reading the rest of the haul post in a minute or so, reading any descriptions of books I’m interested in and skipping those I am not. In a video, there is no skimming. I have to sit through the whole video and see what comes up, or else try to awkwardly skip around and hope I hit a good spot with a book I want to hear more about. I would rather read the blog post.
What do you think? Is it faster to read blogs? Do you watch Booktube? What do you like about it?
Pages Unbound | Book Reviews & Discussions 
I’m the same. I never watch videos online. I’d rather skim an article.
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This is a bit of generalization, but a lot of unrehearsed or unscripted videos are highly repetitive. Someone might talk for seven minutes but end up making only or two points. At least if writing is repetitive, I can see that at a glance and only read the interesting parts. It’s hard to fast-forward through a video to try to skip what’s redundant.
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Yes, I can see how that might happen. If you’re just talking and you don’t know where you were going with a point/forgot where you were going, I think it’s not uncommon to start repeating yourself in a kind of stall, hoping that inspiration will come in the meantime. Or that’s what I sometimes catch myself doing, anyway.;)
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lmao same here, it’s much as faster for me to read than to watch a Youtube video (and I can’t just leave the video on and listen to it while doing other things for some reason).
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Me, too. If I start reading something else while leaving a video on in the background, I won’t be listening to the video.
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I don’t watch BookTube because I so rarely watch YouTube at all. I do most of my browsing when I’m in bed and if I have sound I’ll wake up my husband. I’m sure that if I watched YouTube I’d be more inclined, though.
That said, I didn’t even know there was a thing going on (again)!
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That’s true. I’m also often surfing the Internet when it isn’t really convenient to have sound. Maybe I should remember to have ear buds with me at all times!
I think there’s often a thing going on. I’m just not really in the loop about it all. :p
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That’s probably true. Maybe it’s for the best to be out of the loop 😉
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