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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."
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
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...
So...you're saying he won't be eating his portion of filet mignon?
DIBS!!!
Living With a Nerd
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.
Yes, but when things are free and memory is cheap, why -not- download them all?
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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"
A better question, in this case, is how many trees were saved?
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 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.
Thank you. Nowhere in all this fuss have I seen mentioned that the Larsson books are very, very bad: ill-written, tedious, preposterous, paper-thin characters and highly misogynist despite their feminist pretensions. Books are like money: the bad drives out the good.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
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.
According to this page (http://www.ecolibris.net/bookpublish.asp) and then doing some maths, around 7250. Since Larsson's books are so big, I would up that number to 10000 to 14000. The page also says that there is 8.85lbs of carbon footprint per book... so thats nearly 9 million lbs of carbon footprint per book (again... lets go to 15->18 mil lbs for Larsson's books). Thats about 900 to 1800 cars worth of CO2. Other sites on the internets claim that 1 ebook reader = 22.5 books as far as carbon footprint goes... hopefully people read 23 or more books on their kindles.