Suzanne Collins is best known for three particular books and they are doing extremely well. According to recent statistics from the American arm of Amazon, this trilogy has outsold the entire Harry Potter franchise.
Sara Nelson, the editorial director of ebooks and Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement, “Interestingly, this series is only three books versus Harry Potter’s seven, and to achieve this result in just four years is a great testament to both the popularity of the work and, we think, the growth in reading digitally during that time. Customers love these books and all three titles are consistently on our Top 10 lists in both print and Kindle formats, and The Hunger Games is also the most-borrowed book in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.”
Part of the success of the Hunger Games trilogy is that ever since the Kindle Lending Library started up, these books continued to be super popular. They also gained a tremendous amount of momentum when Amazon unveiled the ability for Kindle owners to lend books to their friends for up to two weeks. The main reason why the Hunger Games saw massive movement in sales, is that the ebooks were available at soon as the printed versions came out. Harry Potter was late to the game with their digital content with no ebooks being available until only a few months ago.
In July, Scholastic, who publishes the trilogy, announced that they have more than 50 million copies of the original three books of The Hunger Games in print and digital formats in the US. Amazon declined to comment on how many copies it has sold.
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.
