Traditionally confined to a small corner reserved for Anglo-Saxon tourists lacking reading material, the sections devoted to literature in the original language are taking up an increasingly important place in bookstores. Groups of teenagers flock there and come to look for very specific titles, identified thanks to the hashtags of the most popular social networks devoted to literature (#booktok, #bookstagram and #booktube).
Teenagers who read? In English, too? The phenomenon, although sensitive, was first noticed by booksellers. “With us, two departments are particularly popular with young people, explains Delphine Ripoche, deputy director of the Durance bookstore, in Nantes, dark romance and the original version. » Dark romance is this literary genre popularized by Fifty Shades of grey and which offers love stories tinged with gently sadomasochistic sex scenes and erotic power relations between lovers.
The VO are the books in the original version, in this case English, and which come for the majority of them from the… dark romance section. “The English-language market has experienced continuous growth for several years, confirms by email Stéphanie Laurent, director of Fnac Darty editorial products. At the end of August, the higher trend in our stores was +20% compared to 2022.”
A phenomenon that dates back to Harry Potter
Already in the 1990s and 2000s, observers were surprised to see young audiences rushing to English-speaking bookstores to read, without waiting for the French translation, the episodes of the saga. Harry Potter. Today, helped by the Culture Pass, which, since February 2021, has allocated each young person aged 15 to 18 an annual credit of €20 to €300 to spend on cultural goods, this new boom in imported literature is nevertheless difficult to quantify. Contacted by M, neither the National Book Center nor the French Bookstore Union have been able to provide national figures on these sales which escape statistics.
At the Durance bookstore, the turnover of the original literature section, which has nearly three thousand titles in English, almost doubled between 2019 and 2022, reaching 300,000 euros last year, or 7.5% of the figure. total business. “It’s a small space, which we expanded before the summer, but it is constantly full. Young people, especially girls, come in groups, often with specific requests,” explains Delphine Gentils, department manager at Durance since 2021.
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