'Odyssey' sweeps bookstores: source-text book sales up tenfold in opening month

Sales of related books at South Korean bookstores have surged as the film "Odyssey" surpassed 10 million domestic admissions.

According to Kyobo Book Centre, sales of books with "Odyssey" in the title — including variant spellings — jumped 940.9 percent in August, the month director Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey" opened, compared with July before its release.

Year on year, sales were up 2,984.8 percent from the same month last year.

Sales of books on Greek mythology also rose 84.3 percent from the previous month and 33.5 percent from a year earlier.

As recently as last August, all 10 top-selling "Odyssey"-related titles were children's Greek and Roman mythology series.

This August, original translations — including Hyundai Jiseong's "Odysseia" and Eulyoo Publishing's "Odusseia" — along with introductory guides climbed into the upper rankings, suggesting that adult readers drawn in by the film developed an appetite for the ancient source texts.

The official screenplay book for "Odyssey" debuted Aug. 19 and reached No. 1 on the weekly arts bestseller list for the fifth week of August.

Demand for Greek and Roman mythology e-book comic sets also surged. Sales of the complete 12-volume e-book set of Hong Eun-young's Greek and Roman mythology series rose about 53-fold in August compared with the same month last year, while a separate seven-volume set climbed roughly 97-fold.

Kyobo Book Centre said the film's release triggered a sharp rise in demand from readers wanting to read Homer's "Odysseia" directly, with related book sales expanding beyond children's mythology content to classical source texts for adult readers.

Meanwhile, "Odyssey" crossed the 10 million admissions mark Sunday, 33 days after its opening — the second film this year to do so, after "The King's Warden" in the first half of the year. It is the first foreign film to reach that milestone since "Avatar: The Way of Water" in 2022, and the 10th in South Korean box office history.