knew e-books would be big. What I didn’t know would be that they would get so big, so fast. On July 28th, Amazon announced that Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoohas become the first e-book to sell a million copies.
It won’t be the last. Stephenie Meyer and James Patterson are quickly closing in on what Amazon is calling the “Kindle Million Club” for authors who have sold over a million Amazon Kindle e-books. Charlaine Harris and Nora Roberts with more than 500,000 Kindle book sales each, will soon join them.
I doubt, however, that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first e-book to cross the million copy downloaded barrier. Amazon after all isn’t the only company to sell e-books. Barnes & Noble was also selling copies of the novel for its Nook e-book reader.
Long before either of those showed up though and started the current tidal wave of e-book popularity, there was Project Gutenberg with its over 33,000 free and public domain e-books. Project Gutenberg , and e-books, dates back to 1971 long before there were even PCs, never mind dedicated e-readers or popular entertainment tablets like the Apple iPad.