Stieg Larsson Is First Author To Sell 1M E-Books 122
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."
No "ideologies" to hold him back (Score:3, Insightful)
So many authors have come out and refused to sell e-books rather than embracing them. With a dead author like Stieg Larsson, there isn't any ideology keeping his estate from selling books in every way possible, and that has been a great thing for them.
Re:"Men Who Hate Women" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It took this long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even 2 GB is a lot of memory when it comes to text files, if I'm not paying for them, why not download them for various reasons? This is important because people are spending what? $10 a download? I'll download free files till my hard drive fills up, but spending money on downloads is a different thing.
Re:"Men Who Hate Women" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good author, worthless time-stamp? (Score:5, Insightful)
A better question, in this case, is how many trees were saved?
Marketing Fix... or liberal media conspiracy? (Score:3, Insightful)
From my anecdotal evidence, agree with you on this number being more marketing engineering than reality. I know very few people who have even heard of the Millennium series outside of my mentioning it. Been enjoying the series as a book I read only while waiting for medical appointments. Enough appointments that I've read the first two so far and not one person in any of the waiting rooms mentioned reading the book and a room full of nervous people tend to make small talk over any connection they can find.
In fact, the only people I've come across who have read the book, or even heard of it, are doctors and one physical therapist who freaked out her book club when she got them to read the first installment. To the rest of the generally illiterate population, they probably think it's a Taco Bell commercial.
This could reflect more on the fact that I live in Central Wisconsin: home of many of your average American hate groups and cults including Ed Gein, Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society and the Posse Commutates (the group who spawned the recent Holocaust Museum shooting and several assassinations of Doctors who performed abortions). The whole area seems pretty obsessed with neo-nazi ideologies and tend to find it difficult to see nazis as the bad guys. Things haven't seemed to change much here from the days Herzog filmed Stroszek here roughly thirty years ago.
For example, when we moved here, the kids in the local high school were tourettes-level obsessed with saying 'Heil Hitler' and casually use the term 'Jew' as a strong pejorative. It was like banging my head against a brick wall trying to convince the principal that this was offensive. Even after explaining to him we are Jewish descendants of Aushwitz survivors, he saw no reason to intercede. Instead, the school's solution was to try and save our souls and convert us to Christianity.
Which is probably why movies like American Beauty don't even show in the local theaters. It's almost Stalinist, the tendency of so many interesting sounding books and movies to just sort of disappear -- airbrushed out of the general consciousness.