Phenomenon Underlying Behind Reading Erotic Novels Disclosed! by Karishma Abhishek on May 11, 2021 at 11:57 PM Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel by E.L. James's that appeared in 2015 had made the whole book market inundated with a flood of erotic bestsellers. People from all corners began wondering what this type of novel's secret of success could be. The readership of erotic novels and the causes of this literary predilection is now investigated, i.e., who reads erotic novels and why, by a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt/Main, Germany and is published as an Open Access article in the journal