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Stieg Larsson Is First Author To Sell 1M E-Books
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."
more like he became the girl who sold a million ebooks
haha girl..
The title of his books remind me of The Flower that Drank the Moon. "Dustoff Varnya is such a brilliant director. Did you see his last film, "The Flower that Drank the Moon"? It was simply glorious!"
Living With a Nerd
What's the significance of 1M units, is that Gold or Platinum anyhow?
What difference does that make? See you at 10M, another arbitrary point in time.
He's not just late, he's dead you insensitive clod!
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.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
You know, I think this might be more of a testament to why a lack of ideologies preventing people from selling e-books makes them money.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm surprised. According to Project Gutenberg, there were 2.8 million books downloaded from their site in the past 30 days. Maybe this chart gives us a clue - only about 5% of those downloads were in Kindle format.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
He's not just late, he's dead you insensitive clod!
I hope being dead doesn't become a requirement for selling 1M eBook units.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How much would it suck to write a bestselling series and die before the first book hit print?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
correlation != causation
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Is this the driver on Top Gear?
Some say that he wrote a book about a girl with a tattoo, and another one about a girl who played with fire.
But all we know is, he's called the Steig!
When Stieg Larsson died suddenly, and after writing just 3 of the planned 10 books about Blomquist and Salander, he left behind Eva Gabrielsson, his common-law wife of 30+ years.
Unfortunately, with no explicit will and no legal acceptance of common-law marriage in Sweden, she inherited absolutely nothing.
See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1240159/Stieg-Larssons-widow-seen-penny-20m-fortune-earned-together.html
Terje
PS. I loved the books, read them all in Swedish instead of waiting for the Norwegian translation.
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Missing from TFA is that readers can now pair thier PDAs, iphones and kindles with google maps to sync the core story with the gps acquired locations of Lundegattan, Sulsen and Dfhseewwwnchcgatten.
Also, I can't get this keyboard to produce umlauts.
I avoided reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because the title sounded like that song Willie Nelson did for the Taco Bell ad, The Girl with the Rose Tattoo.
Glad I waited. Found it in hardcover at a garage sale for a buck. Totally awesome read.
What is this world coming to when sadistic cliche-ridden trash become the top selling e-books?
I would have thought people with ebook readers would read better written novels.
There has been a massive marketing campaign by Amazon and big chain bookstores to sell Larsson's books so that might explain it.
I heard from someone who walked into Borders and got pitched Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by an employee before he even opened his mouth.
Then the cashier asked him if an employee has recommended the book. When he asked why the cashier said that employees had been told by management to do it.
Could it be sellers are getting kickbacks from the publisher?
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.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
The title is incorrect. Larsson is the first to sell 1 Million Kindle ebooks. James Patterson was the first author to sell 1+ Million ebooks across all platforms.
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.
It could be salvaged if Ellen Page played Lisbeth and could redeem her reputation from that dreck flick she was in Juno, too. Reading the book, I imagined Lisbeth to be a mix of her as Treena Lahey and her role in Hard Candy. Was sad to hear she's no longer up for the role.
I loved the Swedish version and can't see it being improved upon. Wonder if they going to recast the location, too?
I bet more people have read the "leaked" U.S. documents. What's better, their free ! ( ie. beer, not in speech given that speech is in the process of becoming more restricted in the former U.S.A.).
Yours In Murmansk,
K. Trout
I wonder how many David Weber has sold on Baen?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Only thing I dislike of the books is hackers in it using Apple computers.
'I don't get upset and teed off at things in life, except computers that don't work right,' -Woz
I always wanted to write eBooks and even came up with character names, ideas, and stuff I role played all over the Internet to see what people think and how to improve my writing skills and make corrections and changes.
I submitted an Ask Slashdot Story on how to write FOSS eBooks but it hasn't been voted on yet to be a real story.
Look first eBook attempt was by Microsoft in 1999/2000 or whatever and the Microsoft Reader software and books in LIT format that the MS Reader could read on Windows CE devices and Windows operating systems on PCs. But it flopped and once again Microsoft failed at trying to do something else besides selling software. Now we got a eBook reader price war, and I expect more mega-corps to enter the eBook reader market. In 3 to 5 years the eBook market will boom as we find a standard like PDF or RTF that most operating systems can read and most eBook Readers can convert to their own format. I hope that OpenOffice.Org and other FOSS office suite programs use the ODT format or something to replace PDF,
Look I know I am not the best writer and make my own mistakes, but I learn from my own mistakes. I need a hobby as I am disabled and out of work since 2002 and wrting FOSS eBooks sounds like a good hobby and I am not trying to earn money from FOSS eBooks just write them, hope for positive feedback and positive criticism and maybe others who can join me and help make the eBook better and add their name to the credits and authors and the like. I don't even mind if someone puts their name or names before mine. I am not doing this for attention, nor notability, nor profits, nor anything but trying to help out people, esp ones just getting into the eBook market that doesn't know a lot about IT and computers and wants to learn. But we slashdotters when we write stuff it goes over the novice's heads and they don't understand it. So a series of eBooks I will write for the people without our knowledge or experience and stuff and write it in a simple way like a cook book or step by step book. I am not writing these for the Slashdot readers but those new to IT and computers who want to learn something about it and cannot afford college and other things like books on it that cost too much to buy.
If it starts a trend then blogs and newspapers and others will get turned into eBooks as well. Starting off a chain reaction.
We can educate people to balance check books and learn how to save money, how to fix a Windows machine with virus infections, beginner's guide to programming in commercial and FOSS languages, and proof of that is right here as the State of California tries to make educational FOSS eBooks possible we can write FOSS eBooks some schools can use that cannot afford the cmmercial ones anymore and this save their money by using eBook readers, PCs, Macs, whatever to read them.
More than that Nintendo just make 100 classic books for the DS series, and why not make more eBook stuff for the other video game consoles? Playstation 3 Sony claims it does everything? Make it read eBooks and synch up with a PSP Go to put the eBooks on it to make it another eBook reader.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
It would be great to think a lot of people are actually reading the Millennium Series. It is a compelling series and well researched. Steig Larson made his mark as a journalist who exposed a variety of covert neo-nazi organizations in Europe. He was a frequent recipient of threats and his death at a young age was initially investigated as a murder.
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.
He died mere months before publishing his first book. That is fate kicking your ass right there.
The lead male character, loosely based on the author, is named is Blomkvist, a wry nod to the real driver named Stig, the guy who perfected cornering with the power slide driving a Saab 96, one of the first front wheel drive cars. He'd apply the gas while locking up the back wheels with the park brake to fly through rough rally course corners and win many a race in this manner throughout the seventies and early eighties. Until the Audi Quattros, he was unbeatable.
He was my hero as a kid, which makes watching that other Stig as annoying as some computer show having a 'secret' character known only as The Woz. who was not Steve Wozniak.
The real Stig Blomqvist was a genius. His innovative technique saved my life when my little Honda broke a strut and lost a front wheel while travelling down the freeway. I used the brake and gas to keep the car under control and brought it to a safe stop at the side of the road rather than letting it flip into a hunk of twisted metal as it seemed destined. Didn't even hit a sign or mile marker.
I find it hopeful for USA that these bestsellers was written by a communist and feminist. Two ideologies that seems to scare Americans more than anything else. You don't have to become communists or femists, thats not the point, but it is good that you don't automatically reject everything that is different from what you are accustomed to.
I haven't read any of the books. My reading of Stieg Larson is limited to his political and journalistic writing and some SF short stories. I assume that his ideological statements in these books are more subtle, or they wouldn't have been accepted by people in USA.
To make me feel even better: You have a black president with one forreign parent. You havent started any new wars this year. The horror stories about US violence and torture from refugees arriving from countries you still occupy are not as bad as they used to be.
If you keep developing like this, I will, in 20 years or so, actually consider you good guys instead of the scum of the earth ;-)
I've read all three (one on paper, the other two on my Kindle), and seen the movies. I enjoyed them all, although the books are clearly better. One thing I did find annoying, though, was the misstatement of Fermat's last theorem in the second and third books. The book (the English translation at least) has it as x^3+y^3=z^3, rather than the correct x^n+y^n=z^n. Proving the n=3 case isn't especially difficult either - it's a straightforward infinite descent proof. I'm a little surprised nobody caught it between the second and third books.
Wipe your chin.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
Ellen Page? have you *read* the books?
Keira Knightley or Olivia Thirlby....
yeh, Thirlby FTW....
Ellen Page could do it if you have like....
michael cera as blomkvist and Bill Murray as Vanger....