If you love reading and you want to share your passion with the world, how do you do so? How do you identify yourself as an ardent bibliophile?

Until a few years ago, the answer was most likely to entail words. You showed your love of reading by writing about what you read, either keeping a writing journal online, establishing a book blog or posting reviews with popular book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

These days, however, book lovers are going pictorial; they are expressing their passion for books, and endeavoring to inspire that feeling in others, through images, either static or moving.

The development of the social media side Pinterest helped to spark interest in the visual – not just cover art of books, but books as art themselves. Countless boards have been created devoted to books, beautiful books, and I for one find browsing them wonderfully soothing and inspirational.

Then you have Instagram, which has become so popular with readers that an entire sub-genre has been created by users, named Bookstagram. Readers post pictures of their current reads ‘in situ’ – and that ‘situ’ is often something quirky, fun and beautiful relating to the literary world, or something straight out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine. Prolific ‘bookstagrammers’ can achieve hundreds of likes for a photo snapped of their new read on a gingham tablecloth with a flower, a cake and a cup of coffee, and the most active compete for likes, one-upping each other on prettiness of shot. Those liking the photos are in effect declaring their passion for reading; it’s one big, happy club.

Moving beyond static images – and neatly skipping past GIFs, which are becoming de rigueur in the reading community on platforms like Twitter – we come to YouTube. For the reading community, the BookTubers are in the limelight. These are avid readers who share their passion for reading in general and their latest reads in videos, invariably filmed before a carefully laid-out bookcase that showcases their reading tastes and design skills.

All of these new pictorial angles embraced by readers are creating a new culture, which is not just making those in the reading community sit up and take notice, but also those in the publishing industry.

BookTubing, for example, can be big business; those who are most prominent have large followings and can monetize their videos. And of course publishers are keen to join the revolution. HarperCollins recently launched a dedicated YouTube channel called Book Studio 16 and launched a contest to entice readers to post a ‘shelfie’ – a film of them in front of their bookshelves explaining their love for reading. The top prize is $500 worth of HarperCollins books, and there are five $300 prizes for runners-up (details here: http://harper.hc.com/shelfiecontest).

What do you think of this new language for book lovers: of shelfies and Bookstagram and BookTubing? Do you follow any such bibliophiles, and if so what do you enjoy about their pictorial content? Does it make you want to buy books, buy bookshelves, buy coffee – or, crucially, read more?

The word that springs to my mind is community. Through such sharing, readers are building bonds with each other, and forming an every-growing and ever-stronger community worldwide. No longer need the reader be a lonely individual curled up in a chair in a quiet corner someplace; the reader can be curled up in a chair in a quiet corner someplace and simultaneously belong to a thriving, supportive, inspiring community of like-minded individuals. Booktastic!