Fire and Fury is experiencing a tremendous shortage since it was released on January 9th. It was published by Henry Holt, which is a subsidiary of Macmillan. There was only 150,000 copies of the in the United States and the demand was so high that stores were selling out before the end of the first day. Amazon is completely out of stock in the United States and UK, with a four week delivery period. I think the one thing that Fire and Fury has reiterated is that the publishing industry is woefully unprepared for breakout books and that digital is the way to go.
The first day that Fire and Fury went on sale the publisher sold 250,000 ebooks and 100,000 audiobooks. The digital edition of Fire and Fury outsold the hardcover at Barnes & Noble (B&N sold over 9,000 print copies) and was #1 in the iBooks store last week. The book is also #1 in Amazon’s Kindle store and is dominating the sales charts at Kobo.
Michael Tamblyn the CEO of Kobo stated that “When I say “this book is a monster” I mean it in every sense of the word: the subject is a rough beast, shambling and spraying acid and bile; as a historical document it is both beyond belief and completely believable; and it’s selling like crazy. Highest one-day sales of any non-fiction title in Kobo history.”
The public library is also seeing an increased demand for the ebook. The Edmonton Public Library had 514 holds placed on the hardcover book with a 106 books on order, and 315 holds on 52 copies of the ebook. The Toronto Public Library has 2,397 holds placed and 330 books on order. The ebook has 1,201 holds on 150 copies. Vancouver Public Library had 655 holds on 86 copies of the hardcover, and 206 holds on 31 copies of the ebook. The New York Public Library has 1,979 holds on 99 copies of the ebook.
Fire and Fury is also beginning to be popular with the file sharing crowd. It has over 1,200 seeders on the Pirate Bay. Wikileaks posted the book for free on Google Drive and was downloaded over 200,000 times, before Google removed the file.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
