In Petit-Quevilly, short literary series to read in five minutes on your smartphone

Rocambole this is the name of this application which offers literary series divided into several episodes. An ideal format for those who want to immerse themselves in reading for a few minutes, the time of a trip on public transport or in a waiting room. “These are episodes you can play in five minutes, so that is exactly the waiting time“enthuses Brigitte, avid reader and user of the application since last spring.

Rocambole is offered free of charge to members of the François Mitterrand library in Petit-Quevilly near Rouen, since the first confinement. An initiative that has met its audience and that continues today. According to the people in charge of the place, this new way of reading is complementary and in no way threatens the activity of the library: “Rocambole is a bit of a publishing house with its own books, so we won’t find the same books on the app as with us. And there are several studies that show that the digital book does not encroach on the physical book at all. We are not at all worried“, specifies Chris Giot, digital referent of the library.

150 original literary series are in the catalog. Thriller, thriller, science fiction or even romance, all styles are available. For Boris Duda, co-founder of Rocambole, the objective is to put reading back at the center of our activities: “Today we are in a hyper-connected society, we waste time every day on social networks, we are in a world where everything goes too fast and finding time to read is really difficult. So I think the application responds well to this problem: give back time to read thanks to a format adapted to our daily lives“.

Created in 2019, the application Rocambole now has 50,000 subscribed readers who pay four euros per month. In the future, its designers plan to add longer stories to their catalog.