Stieg Larsson Is First Author To Sell 1M E-Books 122
Posted
by
timothy
from the nice-tattoo dept.
from the nice-tattoo dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has become the first author to sell more than one million e-books on Amazon. The Swedish noir thrillers feature Lisbeth Salander, an asocial and extremely intelligent hacker and researcher, specialized in investigations of persons, and investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist. Quercus has sold 3.3M copies of Larsson's books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40M copies."
"Men Who Hate Women" (Score:5, Informative)
The original title of the first book is a bit more descriptive, but probably had to be sanitized for the US market. If you can, see the Swedish movie made from that book. It is very well done. Be warned, though - it is as brutal as the book. I don't have much hope for the Hollywood movie. Probably turn Blomkvist into some kind of James Bond figure.
It's too bad that Larsson is not alive to see this. His success is well-deserved.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly, the titles of book one and three are not really translations of the original Swedish titles:
Men who hate women
The girl who played with fire
The sky castle that blew up
e-book != Kindle (Score:5, Informative)
This bothers me in slashdot, of all places. Articles that reference Amazon e-books ONLY COUNT THE NUMBER SOLD ON AMAZON. NOT ALL E-BOOKS!
Just like the earlier misleading story headline that e-books outsold hardcovers for the first time... NO. Amazon KINDLE e-books outsold HARDCOVER books on AMAZON for the first time.
There are plenty other e-book and physical book sellers out there that are NOT amazon. It doesn't emcompass the whole literary universe, so it shouldn't be written as such.
The title of his books (Score:5, Informative)
The title of his books remind me of
Two of those titles aren't his original titles. The first one was originally titled, "Men Who Hate Women." The title was so important to Larsson that he had a bit of a battle on his hands to keep it called that. It's a great description of the underlying purpose of the books, and kind of sad that it got changed.
The third was originally called, "The Air Castle That Exploded". I'm glad that one got changed. :)
I _do_ think it was a good marketing strategy to rename them with a common naming scheme, and probably helped bring the books to the attention of more people, which is good. I think once David Fincher's English-language movies come out, the books will experience another rennaisance of popularity. I've read all three and seen all three Swedish movies, and while the first two are quite good and remain pretty faithful to the parts of the books they cover, the third had some serious issues, I thought. The books are quite a bit better than the movies could be because of the nature of Lisbeth (the Girl) is so introverted that you only know what's going on in her head; you can't tell much of anything by just watching her do things in the movies. Also, the books are quite large, so by necessity, they had to cut major parts of the story out.
Yes, they're huge books. Read them, anyway.
Re:"Men Who Hate Women" (Score:1, Informative)
In fact, there are three movies.
Part 1 [imdb.com]
Part 2 [imdb.com]
Part 3 [imdb.com]
The three movies were also released as a six-part extended mini series, called "Millenium".
Link [imdb.com]
I've only seen the mini series and while I enjoyed watching it, I thought that was a bit short given the long and complicated story. I doubt that the movies are anywhere long enough to really tell the story.
The story can be described as a dark comic book-style action/thriller/crime/mystery with Lisbeth as the hero (young, misunderstood, dangerous) and Mikael as the normal, straight protagonist.
Well worth watching if you like the genre. Especially the mini series.
Re:No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good author, worthless time-stamp? (Score:4, Informative)