You think TikTok is just for Crinjaat, lip synching, and the yoof? Its latest foray into books suggests otherwise. BookTok, the literary branch of video-sharing app TikTok, is driving book sales at scale, the Financial Times reports. BookTok videos — usually short videos where people talk about their favorite books — have clocked up some 56.6 bn views in the past four years, according to TikTok. And while BookTok’s appearance at established events in the global literary calendar — like the UK’s Hay Festival — offers festival goers fresh ways to engage with reading as a discipline, publishers say it’s also helping to spur the thing that matters most to them: An increased bottom line.

New-age Tamagotchi: Virtual parenting edition. Remember Tamagotchis, the widely-popular Japanese digital pets that were sold in small devices in the 90s? Just like actual pets, Tamagotchis needed to be cared for, loved and fed — digitally. Now, Tamagotchi kids are about to make a debut, according to artificial intelligence expert Catriona Campbell. Your computer-generated offspring will cuddle with you, play with you, grow with you, and even look like you, Campbell claims, adding that this could be the world’s remedy to overpopulation. As the financial burdens of bringing a child into the world continue to rise, virtual babies will cost next to nothing to bring up in the metaverse, she points out. “Virtual children may seem like a giant leap from where we are now, but within 50 years technology will have advanced to such an extent that babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world,” she writes in her new book, AI by Design: A Plan For Living With Artificial Intelligence. “As the metaverse evolves, I can see virtual children becoming an accepted and fully embraced part of society in much of the developed world,” Campbell concludes.