BookTubers (from the acronym book + YouTuber) have become key players for the publishing industry, given their influence on children and teens to promote reading and book consumption. Based on an 18-month digital ethnography that combines direct observation, digital interactions on YouTube channels, and other social media and semistructured interviews with 17 Spanish-speaking BookTubers, this study uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital to analyze how BookTubers negotiate their practices with other agents of the publishing world. This article characterizes the challenges the Spanish-language publishing industry is facing in the context of digitalization to attract readers; describes the position that BookTubers have within the YouTube ecosystem, and how they relate with the platform’s actors, politics, and affordances; and analyzes the exchanges that BookTubers establish with publishers—often referred as collaborations—and their implications for their autonomy. This case study helps to understand how platformization allows new agents to transfer capital gained in social media to other cultural industries.

This article focuses on the results from interviews and workshops on teens’ YouTube consumption and use as part of the Transmedia Literacy research project on teens and transmedia collaborative practices carried out in eight countries from Europe, South America and Australia. The project had two main objectives: to detect what teens are doing with media and to determine how they learn to do it. During the fieldwork, YouTube was identified as one of the platforms that teens use most for learning purposes. Therefore, this article maps teenagers’ main YouTube learning topics and motivations for using the platform. We studied the video formats that teens use and the way they use them to learn a wide variety of topics. Three main areas of interest were identified: formal school curriculum, video games and technology and wellness and culture. In all three areas, teens apply the apprenticeship model of learning as they follow YouTube instructors (teachers, experts and peers) to learn about these areas. Teens highlight different YouTube affordances that motivate them to use the platform, including using it as a search engine to find specific information, using the number of views or subscribers to validate the quality of the content, being able to control the video to learn at their own pace and using it as a repository and archive to find information. Teens use YouTube both to complement their formal school curriculum and to explore their own interests. Therefore, YouTube becomes an important learning space for adolescents to learn in a continuum. This means that it is a space that blurs the boundaries between classic oppositions like formal/informal learning due to how teens use it.

This study analyses YouTube videos about delivery riders in Spain as well as the channels in which the videos were uploaded. The aim is to understand the ways that riders are represented in the videos and determine the labour imaginaries that emerge in the context of platformization, which includes work that depends on platforms that use computer architecture and automation systems to arrange exchanges between people, goods, and corporations, such as the work of delivery riders. This article shows how platformization of labour intersects with cultural production because delivery riders’ work has become a video theme in the YouTube platform. Moreover, in some cases riders (or aspiring ones) use YouTube and other social media to interact, share knowledge and organize their job. Based on a thematic analysis of delivery riders' YouTube videos ( n = 40) from 26 channels mined with YouTube Data Tools, this study presents a typology of channels in which riders appear. It also categorizes the main representations of riders as well as the imaginaries that emerge about this type of labour in YouTube videos. The analysis indicates that delivery riders’ work has a transitory nature, which is expressed in the analysed videos. Moreover, the study demonstrates that immigrants are the people who tend to do this type of work in Spain, and shows how being an immigrant plays a particular role in the way riders are represented or gain their social conceptions and aspirations about this kind of work.

A partir del concepto de género desarrollado por Mikhail Bakhtin (1982), este trabajo analiza cuantitativamente los géneros audiovisuales de los booktubers (book + youtubers) en lengua española, con el objetivo de determinar cuáles son las formas discursivas predominantes en su producción y la repercusión que tienen en sus audiencias, a través de indicadores de popularidad (vistas, likes/dislikes/comentarios). Para ello hemos realizado una muestra de vídeos publicados en 2017 (n = 368) y obtenido diversos indicadores cuantitativos de popularidad (número de vistas, comentarios, likes y dislikes) por métodos digitales. Los resultados demuestran que, discursivamente, los booktubers han sido capaces de adaptar a la temática libresca una variedad enorme de géneros audiovisuales, que provienen tanto de otros youtubers (vlogs, challenges, hangouts, hauls, unboxings) como de otros medios de comunicación (reseñas, rankings, listas, entrevistas). Los más presentes en el corpus de análisis son la reseña, la lista y el wrap-up, que cumplen una función de recomendación tradicional; sin embargo, los datos muestran que los vídeos mejor recibidos por las audiencias son aquellos en los que el o la booktuber realiza alguna selección temática de varios libros, como las listas, los rankings o los wrap-ups, lo que refuerza el valor curatorial de este tipo de mediadores de lectura.

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