This article titled “Stieg Larsson becomes first author to sell 1m ebooks on Amazon” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th July 2010 13.27 UTCThe late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson has beaten Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson to become the first author to sell more than one million ebooks on Amazon.
The online retailer said yesterday that Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, had become the first member of its new “Kindle Million Club”, for authors whose work has sold over a million copies in Amazon’s Kindle store in the US. The crime novelist is likely to be joined by thriller writer Patterson – Amazon said last week that it had sold over 860,000 of his ebooks – while Twilight scribe Meyer, Sookie Stackhouse creator Charlaine Harris and queen of romantic suspense Nora Roberts have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books in the US.
“Larsson’s books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. “It’s been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books.”
The novelist’s three books – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – currently top Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, and are also in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time, according to the retailer.
The books have also topped Amazon’s UK Kindle chart for “a good few months”, said Iain Millar, marketing manager at Larsson’s UK publisher Quercus, and are currently at the top of Waterstone’s ebook bestseller list.
But Millar said that UK ebook sales for Larsson were “nowhere near the million mark, which is indicative of the extent to which the US ebook market is ahead of ours”.
“Broadly, the print books are equally popular in the States and in the UK, but uptake of the electronic version is much higher there, primarily because a much higher proportion of book customers in the States own ebook devices,” he said.
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, “but they are literally selling too fast to count”, said Millar.
The news about Larsson’s ebook sales follows Amazon’s announcement last week that over the past three months it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardback books. Kindle sales accelerated in the past month alone, when the online retailer said it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks. The figures cover Amazon’s US book business, include hardback sales when there is no Kindle edition and exclude free Kindle books.
The retailer made no mention of the proportion of paperback salesto Kindle sales, but founder Jeff Bezos stressed that ebooks were not cannibalising print, saying that hardback purchases at Amazon were still growing and that Kindles had overtaken them regardless.
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