iTWire - Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol out of print and doing well

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol out of print and doing well

By Davey Winder
Friday, 18 September 2009 16:49

Everyone expected the new Dan Brown book to smash sales records, but who knew it would do so well 'out of print' in the online world?

Dan Brown, author of the record breaking Da Vinci Code novel, has taken some six years to write his follow-up to that success. It came as no surprise at all to learn that The Lost Symbol sold more than a million copies in hardback across Canada, the UK and US in the first 24 hours after publication.

The fact that it has shot to number one in the bestseller lists the world over was, to be fair, totally expected. However, nobody was really prepared for it to sell quite so well in electronic format.

Yet, it would appear that as far as the biggest seller of books on the planet is concerned, more people are buying the e-book than the print version.

That's right, the Kindle version of The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardback version on Amazon, and has been since it became available. Although Amazon are still declining to reveal the break out sales figures for digital against hardcover versions, the top selling titles in the crime and thriller category on the site clearly show the Kindle version at number one.

Some have argued that this could be down to hardback sale being satiated, having already been on pre-order for 150 days where it topped the sales rankings. Not forgetting that the digital version is considerably cheaper than the print equivalent.

Of course, for some folk paying anything for a new work is just too much. Which is probably why The Lost Symbol has also become a BitTorrent 'bestseller' if you'll excuse the technical inaccuracy of the word in this case. It would appear that people are downloading the audiobook and e-book versions in their tens of thousands.

According to TorrentFreak The Lost Symbol e-book has been downloaded by "approximately 40,000 BitTorrent users" while the unabridged audiobook by "close to 60,000 downloads" in just a couple of days so far.