Malaysian bookshop hits on novel idea to bring back readers addicted to ‘brain rot’ clips

“You don’t even have to look for it,” nine-year-old Anaqi said of the short videos he watches online. “It just shows up automatically, and it’s super interesting.” That instinctive pull is familiar to his father, Firdaus Omar. The 39-year-old Malaysian civil servant said his two children – Anaqi and his six-year-old brother – could spend hours watching the kind of short, noisy, endlessly recommended clips now commonly dismissed online as “brain rot”. He is worried about the effect of such content as too much of what the boys watch is “nonsense” that is not meant for children. Their attention span and language skills also appear to have deteriorated since watching them. “If they watch for too long, they struggle to focus,” he said. He has also noticed problems with fine motor skills. “Writing becomes difficult. Even lifting heavier things becomes difficult.” In 2024, Oxford University Press named “brain rot” its word of the year, defining it as the supposed mental or intellectual decline linked to overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging online content. Oxford said usage of the term jumped 230 per cent between 2023 and 2024 as younger internet users increasingly employ it, often half-jokingly, to describe the sludge filling their feeds. In Kuala Lumpur this week, one bookshop decided to meet that fear on its own turf. BookXcess, the local bookseller behind the 24-hour Sunway Library, has launched what it calls the “Brain Un-Rot Library”, a campaign that turns 100 books into short TikTok videos that look like the kind of content many parents blame for wrecking attention spans in the first place. Starting out as a familiar rolling script overlaid on graphics, the text then lengthens, while visuals slowly disappear, pushing viewers towards the real thing: a physical book. Titles range from school staples such as Animal Farm, Wuthering Heights and 1984 to newer hits including The Hunger Games and Foul Lady Fortune. BookXcess says the videos will roll out on TikTok over the next few weeks, while “Brain Un-Rot Islands” featuring the same titles will also appear in its stores nationwide. New habit “We’re not trying to take them away from social media or from their phone,” Jacqueline Ng, the company’s co-founder and executive director, said during the launch panel. “We’re just trying to introduce another habit.” She said the idea was to catch viewers with the exact format already holding their attention, then slowly lead them into longer text and, ideally, into a bookshop. “Hopefully they go in looking at a Minecraft background and slowly continue with that 80-second video. That itself is already an improvement.” DataReportal’s latest Malaysia report said there were 30.7 million social media profiles in the country at the end of 2025, equivalent to about 85 per cent of the population. At the same time, TikTok has become a serious force in the book business. The platform said in April last year that there were nearly 53 million #BookTok posts globally, and that about 59 million print book sales in 2024 could be tied to BookTok-related creators or content. Last month, TikTok said #BookTok helped sell more than 50 million books across Europe in 2025 alone, generating 800 million euros (US$920 million) in revenue. Malaysia’s reading picture, meanwhile, is more mixed than the usual doom narratives suggest. The National Library’s 2022/2023 reading profile found Malaysians read an average of 24 books a year, up from two in 2005 and 15 in 2014, with 69.9 per cent saying they read to gain knowledge. But a 2025 survey of 1,168 primary and secondary school students found a clear gap between reading for school and reading for pleasure: more than a quarter said they did not read as a hobby, and nearly one in three had fewer than 10 books at home. The same survey also found that 73 per cent of students who identified as frequent readers got their daily fix from digital devices, suggesting screens can also be part of the route back to reading. Attention deficit The trickier question is whether a feed can do more than sell a book. Can it help rebuild the patience needed to finish one? Stijn Massar, a research assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, was cautioned against over-optimism. “As a neuroscientist, I want to be a little bit cautious,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that attention span is literally shrinking.” According to him, the research has not fully caught up with the pace at which platforms and formats change. Still, one shift is plain enough. “People are much less tolerant of boredom,” he said. The discussion was more nuanced than a simple question of shrinking brains. Attention, he said, is not just one thing. Short-form video excels at training what he called “bottom-up attention” – the fast, reflexive kind pulled by flashy visuals, loud sounds and abrupt shifts. Reading, lectures and slower forms of concentration rely more on “top-down attention, the deliberate focus needed to stay with a page or an idea”, he said. “Instead of saying that attention spans are shrinking, I would probably say that the capacity for focus is not being trained enough right now.” Catherine Lee, an associate professor at Sunway University’s Department of Communication, said this was true of her students. “They don’t come in with books. They come in with their smartphone.” That does not mean they have stopped reading, however, only that they now read and discover information differently. Social media, she said, had become a gateway rather than just a distraction. One student even told her he could sit through a three-hour lecture, “if you can tell jokes every five minutes”. On Tuesday, TikTok rolled out #ThinkTwice Training in Malaysia, a series of workshops for parents, creators, educators and civil society groups aimed at building safer and more informed online habits. The rollout expands TikTok’s wider #ThinkTwice digital-literacy push, which the company said at launch had already generated nearly 400 million views on educational content in Malaysia and more than 1.4 million visits to its multilingual knowledge hub. BookXcess’ Ng framed the “un-rot” experiment less as a cure than as a nudge. “It’s not either/or. It’s not like you either are on social media or you read.” The company is trying to work out how to move people from one space to the other, and keep them there long enough to remember what immersion feels like. “At least there’s no notification that comes through the book,” she said. “If you hold a book and just want your ‘me time’ for that half an hour, you actually can have a very meaningful half an hour because you are holding a book and not your phone.”

Malaysian bookshop hits on novel idea to bring back readers addicted to ‘brain rot’ clips

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}BookXcess’ ‘Brain Un-Rot Library’ turns 100 books into short TikTok clips similar to the type of videos blamed for wrecking attention span

BookXcess’ ‘Brain Un-Rot Library’ turns 100 books into short TikTok clips similar to the type of videos blamed for wrecking attention span