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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 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...
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
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.
Wow, that's pretty ignorant.
Most times the authors are against it because the publishing houses offer them a tiny flat fee and no percentage of the sales...As far as THEY are concerned, it's just one printing! And the author gets crap, which is wildly unfair given that the costs to the publishing house are non-existent.
In this case, since he's dead, there is no one to stop the publishing houses from raping his corpse.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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"
I don't know about that. There was a lot of dispute over Larsson's estate. His partner through many years, didn't get anything, because they never married or registered their relationship - and the reason they never did was that they were hiding from neo-nazis, which Larsson had royally pissed off.
Disputes over rights aren't exactly ideal from a publisher's perspective. I think the success is a lot about the rather extreme anti-banker/capitalist/influental people sentiment in his stories, which has hit a nerve in the current troubles. Maybe that is also a genre of fiction which US audiences has been somewhat short on, due to a generation of films sanitized from such topics by Hollywood blacklists.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
None of the books were published until after his death, and he apparently died without a will.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
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.