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

A couple reads using different methods at a Kuala Lumpur Reads event.

Photo: Instagram/kualalumpurreads “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.” BookXcess’ “Brain Un-Rot Library” is a series of social media content featuring 100 of the world’s best loved books.

Photo: Handout 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. “We’re not trying to take them away from social media or from their phone,” Jacqueline Ng, the company’s co-founder and executive d

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