Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has inspired members of Gen Z to download editions of the audiobook in record numbers.
Recent data from Circana BookScan show that sales for all editions of the 3,000-year-old epic poem jumped 76 percent this year, reaching record levels with the arrival of Nolan’s blockbuster film – a critical and commercial darling on its way to grossing over $300 million worldwide by the end of this week. Per Variety:
The Nolan bump has extended to Spotify streams of the audiobook format of The Odyssey. According to Spotify, “Across 91 audiobook editions in 10 languages, ‘The Odyssey’ has now been listened to on Spotify for the equivalent of more than 43 years of continuous playback.”
There’s more: On July 17, the opening day of Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” listens to the audiobook of “The Odyssey” jumped more than 500% on Spotify; in June, weeks before the premiere, listens to ‘The Odyssey’ jumped increased more than 240%, while post-premiere listens are on pace to be up roughly 680%; and on Spotify, “The Odyssey” has been especially popular among younger listeners, with 36% of listeners being Gen Z, 45% Millennial, and male listeners, with 63% of all listenership being men.
Lena Yang, Senior Editor for Audiobooks at Spotify, expressed excitement at seeing the classic story find a whole new audience.
“It’s always exciting to see beloved classics find new audiences,” Yang told Variety. “Audiobooks offer a fresh way to experience timeless tales, and it’s especially rewarding to see listeners returning to ‘The Odyssey’ in such a meaningful way.”
Gen Z taking an interest in Homer’s epic tale comes as reading has declined to record levels, with some cultural commentators lamenting our spiral into a “post-literate society.”
“You can see it in the numbers. Fewer than half of all American adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. And just 38 percent read a novel or a short story,” PBS Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown said earlier this month.
“A separate survey found the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent two decades ago to 16 percent in 2023. In some ways, it’s a continuing trend,” he added.
Brown was responding to an explosive article by Rose Horwitch in The Atlantic that declared, “The End of Reading is Here.”
Nolan’s film is far from the first adaptation to inspire a new generation of readers to partake in the original source material; as Library Journal noted in 2003, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy led to a 1,000 percent spike in sales for Tolkien’s treasured masterpiece.
“Sales grew 1000 percent in 2001 from pre-film levels, grew again slightly in 2002, and are somewhat slower this year,” the publication wrote in 2003. “That’s an extraordinarily high correlation between reported/extrapolated movie ticket sales and readers by any measure. The recent explosion brings the total number of the author’s U.S sales to more than 80 million.”