Normally I write about exceptional bookshops and libraries, places with a soul. This time I want to do the opposite. I want to elaborate on observations in mass-market chains, the Thalias and WHSmiths of this world, precisely because they have no soul of their own. My hypothesis is, that they are mirrors of societies. A chain bookshop does not curate, it responds. Its assortment is optimized by category managers with sales data, and so the shelves are, in effect, a referendum. Nobody claims in a survey that they read pop-psychology paperbacks - but the till receipts don't lie. Economists call this a revealed preference. That’s why nobody likes McDonalds, but it's always packed. So, walk into the biggest bookshop chain of a country, look at what is stacked highest at the entrance, and you know what ails the population.
The idea came to me recently in a Thalia in Germany. Thalia runs about 400 stores in Germany and Austria and is doing well - expanding, even. But the front tables were a wall of self-help: nutrition compasses, inner-child healing, the 1%-method. And where the fiction started, much of it turned out to be self-help in disguise - novels engineered so that the protagonist learns, by page 280, to set boundaries and practice gratitude. Literature as a delivery mechanism for therapy. Add the Fitzek psycho-thrillers, which for two decades have been the most reliable German bestsellers, and you get a strange composite portrait: a country that wants to be frightened in a controlled setting and then repaired afterwards. Fear and repair, that is the German shelf. Angst and Ratgeber! Hugendubel? Same!
In London it is a different pathology. WHSmith, founded 1792, was for two centuries the definition of the British high-street bookseller. Today it is mainly a snack shop with a residue of books, and even that is over: in 2025 the company sold all 480 high-street stores to a private equity firm, which renamed them - I am not making this up - "TGJones", while WHSmith retreats into airports and railway stations, selling meal deals to people in transit. To be fair to the British, Waterstones has taken the opposite path and is thriving as an actual bookshop, and the UK fiction market just crossed £1 billion for the first time. But the reading base is eroding underneath: only half of British adults still read regularly, down from 58% a decade ago, and one in six struggles to read at all. What sells is Richard Osman — cozy crime, retirees solving murders between tea breaks — and "romantasy", which pushed fantasy sales up 41% in a year. Comfort and escape. A nation reading itself to sleep.
Triggered by these recent observations, I decided to expand the sample. Thirteen more countries, always the same method: find the dominant mass-market chain, look at what it actually sells, and hold it against what we know about the education and the mental state of the population.
But let’s start with a literature review on the subject itself. Marc Verboord published a study in Poetics comparing thirty-seven years of French, German and American bestseller lists, and found that the French lists reward literary consecration (prizes, critical acclaim) far more than the German and American ones, where market logic ruleoup of network scientists mined Goodreads data across countries and found that of all of Hofstede's cultural dimensions, only individualism significantly predicts national book preferences (Maity et al. 2021) — which fits my thesis nicely, since self-help is the literary genre of individualism par excellence. The Post45 Data Collective has assembled an International Bestsellers Dataset with nearly 8,000 entries from over forty countries, showing a converging global mainstream: Ferrante, Stephen King, Joël Dicker, Colleen Hoover everywhere. And the sociologists of self-help - Eva Illouz in Saving the Modern Soul, Micki McGee in Self-Help, Inc. - have long argued that the genre booms wherever economic security erodes and the self becomes a permanent construction site. The Economist put it best last December: read through a century of self-help books and you get "an archaeology of anxiety". So the method is sound.
Let me try to summarize my observations country by country. I am sure, this is all debatable. Also the selection is a little random. I would have love to include China, Russia and Iran for example, which appear to me being some of the world’s more educated places. But, even I lived in China for 12 years, I am struggling to overcome the language barrier and lack insight. Then other countries I left out, like for example the Netherlands, because it’s irrelvant, and will be drowned by rising sea levels anyways. But let me try with some others. As a disclaimer (!): I did not read most of the books I found in these shops. I merely took the cover text as an indicator.
Let’s start with France, which is the great exception, and the French know it. Fnac, Cultura, and - very French, this - the Espace Culturel inside the E.Leclerc hypermarkets bring books to the masses, protected by the Loi Lang of 1981, which fixes book prices and thereby keeps 3,000 independent bookshops alive as well. The bestseller lists still make room for the Prix Goncourt: Mauvignier's "La Maison vide" sold half a million copies, a demanding literary novel, unthinkable in Germany at that scale. French readers famously reject American-style self-improvement; the working assumption in Paris is that you are not broken and do not need fixing, a form of collective self-respect I find increasingly attractive. But look closer and the cabinet is not empty: the nonfiction charts are now topped by hard-right political essays - Sarkozy's prison diary, Bardella's programme - and the single bestselling author in France is Freida McFadden with domestic thrillers, nearly six million copies. A country that reads Goncourt winners, political pamphlets and Astérix (1.6 million copies in ten weeks) simultaneously is not anxious about itself as an individual. It is anxious about itself as a nation. The French have externalized their therapy into politics. And this is how they like it.
Spain has gone the other way entirely. Casa del Libro, the Planeta-owned chain, still keeps books at the core, and reading is actually rising — 65.5% now read in their free time, driven by young urban women. But what do they read? The national bestseller phenomenon is Marian Rojas Estapé, a psychiatrist whose "Cómo hacer que te pasen cosas buenas" has squatted on the lists for years, joined by "Hábitos atómicos", the Spanish edition of Atomic Habits. El País diagnosed its own bestseller lists as "selling common sense under the guise of science" - a country discovering therapeutic culture with the enthusiasm of the recently converted. Spain, one should remember, went from dictatorship to hypermodernity within one generation; perhaps the neuro-help boom is the sound of a society metabolizing that speed.
Italy is the most instructive case of the divergence between book market and reading nation. Giunti al Punto, Mondadori Store, and Feltrinelli operate together nearly a thousand outlets, yet ISTAT reports that only around 40% of Italians read even one book a year, with a brutal North-South divide. Adult literacy scores are among the lowest in the OECD. And the shelves? Italy's biggest homegrown bestseller of recent years is Erin Doom's "Fabbricante di lacrime" — the Tearsmith — a dark BookTok romance written pseudonymously. A country with the greatest literary patrimony in Europe, whose actual reading minority consumes imported emotional intensity.
Portugal I approached with sympathy, because Bertrand in Lisbon is the oldest operating bookshop in the world, founded 1732, before the earthquake, and the chain that carries its name still runs fifty stores that genuinely sell books. But the PIAAC adult skills survey delivered a shock: 42% of Portuguese adults have very low literacy, among the weakest results in the OECD - the long shadow of Salazar, who kept his population poor, pious and unschooled deep into the 1970s. The bestseller list at Fnac Portugal in 2025 was topped by "Astérix na Lusitânia", followed by Colleen Hoover, Freida McFadden, "Hábitos Atómicos", and - I found this genuinely touching - adult coloring books. A country that reads little, and when it reads, wants gentle humor about its own Roman past and pictures to fill in with crayons. That is not a diagnosis, that is a lullaby.
Then the Visegrád surprise, which upended my expectations completely. Poland's Empik - 386 stores, twelve million customers a year - is the Eastern European Thalia, heavily diluted with toys and gift items. Only 41% of Poles read a book a year. Yet Polish fifteen-year-olds score 489 in PISA reading, well above the OECD average and above Germany. And what the reading minority reads is crime, crime, crime - 27% name it their preferred genre, with the industrial-scale thriller author Remigiusz Mróz as the most-read writer, plus a new Witcher novel from Sapkowski. A country that performs excellently in school, reads little as adults, and when it reads, wants dark problems that get solved in the end. After a century of dark problems, one understands the appetite.
The Czech Republic is the quiet champion of the whole survey. Luxor and Knihy Dobrovský dominate the chains; the government abolished VAT on books entirely; 73% of Czechs read at least one book a year, averaging nearly ten books per person - the biggest bookworms in Europe, as they were already in Bohemian times when reading was resistance. And here is the remarkable thing: the 2025 bestseller lists are topped not by imports but by domestic authors - Patrik Hartl's "Manželství" (Marriage), a novel about the everyday struggles of an ordinary couple, and Alena Mornštajnová's historical fiction. A nation that reads about itself, in its own language, at scale. The Czech medicine cabinet contains mostly literature about ordinary Czech life. Diagnosis: comparatively healthy. Kafka would be suspicious, of course.
Austria is Germany with better jokes. Thalia leads there too, and the Fitzek thrillers and Stefanie Stahl's inner child ("Das Kind in dir muss Heimat finden" - the child in you must find home, a title that says everything about the German-speaking soul) sell just as they do in Hamburg. But the number one bestseller of 2024 was Thomas Stipsits' "Allerheiligen-Fiasko", a comic regional crime novel set in a Burgenland village. Austrians take the German anxiety package and add self-irony and a body in the vineyard. Meanwhile PIAAC shows Austrian adult literacy declining below the OECD average - but declining cheerfully, which counts for something. That’s where “peruse of happiness” gets you.
Switzerland reads like the country it is: 83% read at least one book a year, among the highest in Europe, and in 2024 seven of the ten bestselling novels at Orell Füssli were by Swiss authors - Christine Brand, Alex Capus, Martin Suter's heirs. The nonfiction chart, however, gives the game away: the top titles were Elke Heidenreich's "Altern" (Ageing) and Barbara Bleisch's "Mitte des Lebens" (Midlife). The safest, richest, most orderly country in the sample lies awake at night worrying about getting old. When all external risks are insured, mortality is the last uninsurable item. Even the Swiss cannot hedge that one - yet.
Hungary delivered the most political finding. Líra and Libri divide the market. Libri, which controls nearly half the book trade, was acquired by a foundation close to the Orbán government - the national medicine cabinet, nationalized. The market itself is shrinking, adult literacy scores are below OECD average, and what sells is imported escapism: Freida McFadden, Fourth Wing, dark romance - plus, tellingly, Edith Eger's "The Choice", a Holocaust survivor's book about inner freedom. A literary essay once described melancholy as "a Hungarian condition". The bestseller list agrees: a nation reading its way out of the room.
Across the Atlantic, Canada first. Indigo/Chapters - I know these stores well from my Toronto time - long ago rebranded itself as a "cultural department store": candles, throw blankets, wellness objects, and somewhere behind the scented section, books. The books themselves are Carley Fortune lake romances, romantasy, and above all Gabor Maté, the Vancouver physician whose trauma books ("The Myth of Normal") are a national institution. Canada has one of the highest adult literacy scores in the OECD, and it uses that literacy to read about trauma while purchasing a blanket. A gentle country gently worried about itself. It fits everything I have written about Canada before; I mean that affectionately.
The USA is more interesting than its caricature. Barnes & Noble, given up for dead a decade ago, is opening sixty stores a year under James Daunt - the same Englishman who saved Waterstones - by, of all radical strategies, putting books back where the gift items were. What sells is romantasy (Rebecca Yarros, Sarah J. Maas), manga (up 45% in unit sales), true crime, and self-help about anxiety and personal finance. Meanwhile the National Endowment for the Arts reports that only 48.5% of American adults read even one book a year, and adult literacy in PIAAC dropped twelve points since 2017, with roughly 28% of adults at or below the lowest proficiency level. The American shelf is a split-screen: a shrinking, highly engaged reading class escaping into dragon romance, and a majority that has left the building. The bookshops are recovering, the readership is in accelerated decline. That is not a paradox, it is a concentration.
Brazil wears its heart on the shelf like no other country. After the bankruptcies of Saraiva and Livraria Cultura, the chain Leitura from Belo Horizonte took over the mass market with 130 stores. And the PublishNews bestseller list is a document: "Café com Deus Pai" (Coffee with God the Father), a daily devotional, alongside Napoleon Hill's "Outwitting the Devil" - a self-help book from the 1930s, resurrected, and "The Power of Self-Responsibility". Faith, hustle, and self-responsibility, in a country where PISA reading scores stand at 410 and systemic problems are, let us say, abundant. When the state does not deliver, the individual contracts God and Napoleon Hill as consultants. It is the most coherent medicine cabinet in the sample, and the saddest.
And finally Argentina, which I saved for last because it breaks the pattern beautifully. Buenos Aires has more bookshops per capita than any city in the world - about 25 per 100,000 inhabitants. The chains, Yenny-El Ateneo and Cúspide, still sell books as books; El Ateneo Grand Splendid, in a converted theatre, is routinely called the most beautiful bookshop in the world. And the perennial national bestseller is Gabriel Rolón - a practicing psychoanalyst who fills theatres like a rock star, writing about happiness, loss and desire. Where Germany reads self-help to repair itself and Brazil reads it to survive, Argentina reads psychoanalysis as a spectator sport. A country in permanent economic crisis, with a PISA score of 401, that treats introspection as entertainment and Freud as a founding father. The economy fails; the inner life flourishes. There is a lesson in there somewhere, though a well-analyzed porteño would tell me the lesson is precisely that there is no lesson, only material for the next session.
What does the whole shelf say, then? Three things.
First, the global mass market is converging - Fourth Wing, Freida McFadden and Colleen Hoover appear on nearly every list above, the same way every airport has the same Starbucks. The distinguishing national signal has migrated to the nonfiction shelf: that is where a country tells you what it thinks is wrong with itself. Second, the self-help ratio is a fever thermometer, but it measures different fevers: in Germany the fear of not functioning, in Spain the vertigo of hypermodernity, in Brazil the absence of the state, in Argentina the joy of the examined life. The French, who read political pamphlets instead, have simply decided the problem is not them. And third - I owe myself this correction - I was wrong that Germany and the UK would be the dullest cases. They are the clearest ones. A German bookshop selling fear and repair, and a British bookshop chain that gave up on books to sell meal deals to people in transit, are not dull. They are the two most honest self-portraits in the entire gallery.
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Picture: Public domain, Edward Hopper, "Compartment C, Car 293" (1938).