Why Book Clubs Are Booming Worldwide: 7 Communities to Know in 2026

Hello. I’m Moeno Morimoto, the bookseller behind Chapters bookstore, an online bookstore in Tokyo.

Book clubs are quietly booming around the world. Not as study groups for literature lovers, but as a new kind of social scene, closer to a run club or a listening party than to a seminar.

This article introduces seven book club communities worth knowing, plus the Korean “text hip” phenomenon, with figures checked against official websites and Instagram accounts. At the end, I offer a bookseller’s view on why this is happening now.

Written by Moeno Morimoto

Born 1990. Bookseller, book curator, and CEO of MISSION ROMANTIC Inc. She runs the online bookstore Chapters and the physical shop Chai to Sensho in Ichigaya, Tokyo, where she hosts group book clubs, a women-only silent reading night, and one-to-one online reading sessions. Author of the novel Asu wa Kigyōbi! (Shogakukan). Her favourite thing is reading somewhere far from home.

Note: all figures and follower counts were checked against official websites and Instagram accounts in September 2026. Numbers change daily, so please check the official accounts for the latest information.

Luxury houses have started paying attention to books

One of the clearest signs of how far reading has spread is this: luxury houses have started building projects around books.

In June 2025, Miu Miu staged Miu Miu Summer Reads in public gardens across five cities: Milan, Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong and Osaka. Visitors were given two books for free — Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables and Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years — each wrapped in a Miu Miu dust cover and bookmark. Both authors are women, and one of the five cities was in Japan.

Two months earlier, in April 2025, Miu Miu held Miu Miu Literary Club in Milan, again built around Simone de Beauvoir. Books are clearly not a one-off campaign for the house but an ongoing project.

In February 2026, Coach announced Explore Your Story. Working with Penguin Random House, the house turned twelve genuinely readable miniature books into charms for its Tabby bag. The list runs from Jane Austen and Maya Angelou to Celeste Ng and Natsu Miyashita’s The Forest of Wool and Steel.

The campaign line is “Explore Your Story.” In Japan it features the singer Lilas Ikuta.

Sources: Miu Miu Summer Reads 2025 (official) / Coach, “Explore Your Story” press release (25 February 2026)

Are book clubs really trending? The numbers

“Book clubs are having a moment” is easy to say and hard to picture, so let’s start with the figures.

* Service95’s account covers the whole media brand, not the book club alone.

A single book club community with 663,000 Instagram followers. A few years ago that would have been unthinkable.

Seven book clubs to know from around the world

Hand over your phone and just read

What began in Amsterdam now runs in 16 cities across 10 countries, including London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon, Zurich and Bali.

I joined one myself, in Paris, in 2025. You hand over your phone at the door, which is already a small thrill. Everyone reads whatever book they brought, in silence, and afterwards you talk to the people near you about what you were reading. I don’t speak French and was nervous about the language, but everyone switched to English without being asked.

It is less a book club than a club for spending time away from your phone, together. Which means people who don’t read can come too. That open door is what a 663,000-follower account looks like.

Not a book club. A reading party.

Ambient music plays in a curated venue while everyone reads whatever they like. There is no assigned book. The invitation is simply “bring your favorite book, discover your people.”

From New York it has spread to Los Angeles, London, Chicago, Toronto and more than twenty cities in total. A “Passport” membership from $9 a month gets you into chapters anywhere. The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian and Forbes have all covered it.

The world’s largest silent reading club

Two friends, Guinevere de la Mare and Laura Gluhanich, started it in San Francisco in 2012. It launched formally in 2015 and now has more than 2,000 chapters in over 60 countries.

The format is roughly an hour of sustained silent reading. Socialising afterwards is optional. There is no assigned book, no presentation, no membership fee, and anyone can start a chapter where they live. That last detail is what produced the scale.

Chosen by Gen Z, for Gen Z

Sunnie, the Gen Z arm of Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, launched this club in 2026. It runs “by and for Gen Z readers”, and the readers themselves choose the titles.

Author spotlights, community polls, book-inspired playlists and mood boards all come with it. Everything around the act of reading has been built to be shareable. Coach sponsors it, which puts it on the same line as the book charms above.

A pop star picks one book a month

Service95 is the newsletter Dua Lipa founded in 2022. The name combines her birth year, 1995, with the idea of being of service. The book club grew out of it in June 2023.

The first session was a live interview with Booker-winning novelist Douglas Stuart at the Hay Festival. Since then Dua Lipa herself selects one book a month, and each pick arrives with an author interview, a playlist and essays. There is a podcast too.

What is “text hip”? Reading is cool again in Korea

Korea is where the numbers are clearest. “Text hip” (텍스트힙) combines “text” and “hip,” and describes reading being embraced as a stylish act in itself.

Figures from Yes24, one of Korea’s largest online bookstores, show literary book purchases by teenagers and people in their twenties moving like this:

Three consecutive years of double-digit growth. In 2025, book reviews posted by teenage readers rose 113.1% year on year, and those by readers in their twenties rose 35%. Reading, then writing about it and sharing it — that whole loop is what text hip means.

Source: The Kyunghyang Shinmun, “Young people who do not read books? ‘Text Hip’ has changed that” (21 April 2026, reporting Yes24 data)

Book clubs are a big part of what sustains it. Trevari, Korea’s best-known paid book club, is the clearest example.

What makes Trevari distinctive is that you cannot attend without submitting a written response first. Rather than lowering the barrier, it deliberately raises it. What members pay for is the certainty that everyone in the room has actually read the book and thought about it.

Walking around Seoul, you run into beautiful bookshops constantly. The growth of independent bookstores there is something you can feel on the street.

There is one more thing pushing this along. Books carry no value-added tax in South Korea. Article 26(1)(8) of the VAT Act lists books, newspapers, magazines and official gazettes as exempt supplies (advertising excluded). With a standard rate of 10%, that exemption comes straight off the price of every book.

In Japan, books carry the full 10% consumption tax. The reduced 8% rate covers food and subscription newspapers only — books and magazines are not included. An exemption that helps sellers and readers alike is something I would love to see here.

Source: Value Added Tax Act, Article 26 (Korea Law Information Center)

Why book clubs, and why now

Having looked at all of them, four reasons stand out.

The last one is what I keep coming back to. The hardest moment among strangers is the pause in the conversation. A book club has permission to be silent designed into it from the start. No other kind of gathering does that, and I think it is a genuinely powerful invention.

What about Japan?

Japan is further along than people outside it tend to assume. I checked seventeen book clubs across the country one by one against their official sites and wrote them up by name, with format, price and group size.

The short version: joining a book club in Japan has become genuinely easy. There are silent reading sessions, clubs you can attend without having read anything, women-only gatherings, and free ones run by public libraries. The same shift visible abroad is happening here.

A rare combination: book curation meets matching

Every club above is built on gathering in one place. I’d like to close with something shaped differently — the service we run, Chapters.

Chapters is an online bookstore that is also a place to meet people through books. We curate a book for each member, connect members who have read the same book, and give those two people twenty minutes to talk online. We call it an “apéro.” A book club with a minimum size of two.

This mechanism, combining book curation with matching, is patented in Japan.

As far as we have been able to find, very few services anywhere combine book curation with matching in this way. While book clubs spread across the world as places to gather, Chapters went the other direction: two people is enough, and online is fine.

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Follower counts reflect the official Instagram accounts as displayed in September 2026.

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