What is Silent Book Club? Why people gather for a book club where nobody talks — a quiet solidarity in 2,000 chapters worldwide

From last time's Korea to America

In the previous post I wrote about “text-hip,” the reading phenomenon sweeping Korea.

Reading, and copying passages out by hand, became cool among the young — while the adult reading rate hit a record low. Fervour and disconnection at the same time: that was Korea's reality.

So how do people on the other side of the ocean, in America, sit down with a book?

This time I want to look at Silent Book Club, an American-born movement now spreading around the world, and at the social-media reading communities that are shaking bookshops across the United States.

What Silent Book Club is

Born in San Francisco

2012

In the corner of a small wine bar

Countries with a chapter

50+ countries

Bars, cafés, parks, museum courtyards

Chapters

2,000+

Still no assigned book, still no discussion

The odd book club with no assigned book and no discussion

When you hear “book club,” what scene comes to mind?

• Everyone finishes the same assigned book beforehand
• You meet at a café or a community space
• You trade impressions and debate the author's intent and interpretations
• Inside, you fidget: “I should say something clever and intelligent”

For me at least, a book club always seemed a bit of a hurdle — an event that burns energy.

And America does have a deep tradition of exactly this kind of community book club. The bestsellers made by Oprah Winfrey's and Reese Witherspoon's book clubs tell that history.

But Silent Book Club, which started in a small San Francisco wine bar in 2012, turned every one of those conventions upside down.

The rules are almost disappointingly simple

1. No assigned bookEveryone brings whatever they want to read. A novel, a comic, a textbook — anything.
2. The first 30 minutes: light hellosOrder a drink, exchange a word or two. If you don't feel like talking, you don't have to.
3. Then one hour of complete silenceEveryone simply reads their own book. This is the heart of the gathering.
4. The last 30 minutes: only if you want toChat casually about what you're reading, then go home. No one has to share a review.

No pressure of homework, no shrinking before someone else's interpretation.

Just strangers who share one thing — wanting to read — gathering in a bar, a café or a park, opening their own books in silence with a drink in hand.

This gathering, odd at first glance, has now spread to more than 50 countries and over 2,000 chapters.

Accounts worth peeking at: the movement on the ground

This “quiet fervour” is visible in real time on social media. A few emblematic accounts:

1. Silent Book Club, official (Instagram: @silentbookclub)The official account, sharing chapters around the world every day. Scroll the feed and you see dozens of adults reading paper books in silence, glass in hand, in places that look nothing like a reading room: the counter of a dim Irish pub, a Brooklyn rooftop, a museum courtyard. The assumption that reading means shutting yourself in a room is pleasantly broken.
2. Library Science (Instagram: @libraryscience)The reading community founded by the model Kaia Gerber, who also appeared in the previous post. Portraits of her holding books, conversations with up-and-coming writers, a following in the hundreds of thousands. A leading voice for today's mood that reading looks intelligent and cool.
3. The heat of BookTok (TikTok: @aymansbooks, @abbysbooks and others)You cannot talk about American reading trends without #BookTok, the reading community on TikTok. Top creators like @aymansbooks (over 900,000 followers) and @abbysbooks (over 400,000) deliver full-force reaction videos: sobbing after finishing a book, gushing over a favourite novel. Not criticism or analysis but an explosion of “how much this book shook me” — posts that move bookshop tables and can push a years-old title onto the national bestseller list overnight.

Why do Americans gather in a place where nobody talks?

Young people share feelings intensely on TikTok, while adults crowd into a book club where not a word is spoken. The two look like opposites, but I think the reason underneath is the same.

In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General warned that loneliness carries a health risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Individual isolation has become a serious social problem in modern America.

And as remote work spread, the places that were neither home nor workplace — the so-called third places — vanished quickly from daily life.

I want to connect with someone. But making small talk with strangers, minding every word, for an hour on end — that costs too much energy and leaves me drained.

To this dilemma born of American individualism and pragmatism, Silent Book Club is a remarkably precise answer.

• No obligation to talk (you can stay in low-power mode)
• Yet you escape the emptiness of scrolling your phone alone at home
• Look up, and there is the profile of someone turning pages just like you

Korea's “show it,” America's “strip it down”

If Korea's text-hip took solitary reading in the direction of showing it — favourite fountain pens and notebooks laid out, posted to Instagram, made into culture —

then America's Silent Book Club went the other way: strip away excess communication and share only the physical space and the presence of others.

Korean twenty-somethings copying passages in silence for an hour in an independent bookshop. American adults at a bar, glass in hand, turning pages without a word.

Different countries, different cultures — and what they are looking for is strikingly alike.

I want to read alone. But I want someone's presence nearby

Reading time is, all the way down, personal. Nobody can understand that line for you; you have to set your own imagination to work. In that sense reading is a very solitary, very quiet act.

But alone at a desk, your eye goes to a phone notification, or the day's noise carries your thoughts off. The wish to read is real, yet keeping the silence on willpower alone is truly hard in a world wrapped in algorithms.

At such times, without exchanging a word, the mere presence of someone quietly reading in the same space can somehow bring you back to the book in your hands.

Not interfering with each other. Yet spending the same hour together.

The book in your hands, and the sound of a page turning

I love the time I spend reading, and I wanted a place in my daily life where that quiet presence could be felt — so I am building a reading space called mekuru as a solo developer (there is an iPhone and iPad app too).

No timeline of hot takes, no likes to trade as on social media. Just avatars sitting down in the same room, each quietly opening a book — a space for paper books.

You may not be able to walk into an American bar or a local silent book club every day. But thirty minutes at night, before bed.

Borrowing, quietly, the presence of someone somewhere turning a page, and slowly opening the book in your hands. I hope that small, luxurious time can sit right next to a busy everyday life.

This series travels through reading cultures country by country. Part 3 will look at Asia's late-night bookshops and study-room culture.