As ebooks continue to grow in popularity, it seems that new sales records are constantly being set. Case in point: according to the New York Times, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has become the first ebook to sell over 1 million copies. And with combined sales of the entire Millennium trilogy at over 3 million copies, it sounds like The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest shouldn’t be too far behind.

This is the first time an individual title has sold a million ebooks. Both James Patterson and Nora Roberts have sold over a million ebooks, but that’s across all their titles (and the prolific authors have dozens of books available digitally). So for an individual book to sell that many ebooks is truly impressive.

Have you read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Why do you think the book is so insanely popular?

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David Fincher is rounding out the cast for his adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Deadline reports that Goran Visnjic (‘ER’) has signed on to play Dragan Armansky, the CEO of the security firm that employs computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. He is contracted for all three films in the trilogy.

Rooney Mara (Lisbeth), Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), and Robin Wright (Erika Berger) star in the film, which Fincher is directing from a Steve Zillian screenplay. Also appearing in the film will be Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Joely Richardson, so the cast is impressive.

Visnjic is best known for playing Dr. Luka Kovac on the long-running drama series ‘ER.” Last year he starred in the BBC miniseries ‘The Deep’ and recurred on TNT’s ‘Leverage.’

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is set for a December 21, 2011 release.

Rooney Mara has landed the coveted role of badass computer hacker Lisbeth Salander in the movie based on Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She’s a relative unknown who most recently starred in the 2010 remake of Nightmare on Elm Street. She beat out higher profile actresses like Natalie Portman, Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, and Emma Watson. (Daemon’s Movies)

Idris Elba has been cast as Alex Cross in the upcoming movie Cross, based on James Patterson’s book of the same name. Morgan Freeman, who previously played Alex Cross in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, has been deemed too old for the part. In the book, Alex Cross hunts down a serial rapist who may be tied to the murder of his wife 14 years earlier. Elba has been on HBO’s The Wire and NBC’s The Office. (Deadline Hollywood)

As you may recall, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is so long that filmmakers decided to split the final movie into two parts. Now there’s word about the split point for the two movies. [SPOILER ALERT] According to Entertainment Weekly, the split happens “at about Chapter 24 of the book, with Voldemort gaining possession of the Elder Wand, one of the three Deathly Hallows that allow the bearer to conquer death.” Part one of Deathly Hallows will be released on November 19th. (MTV Movies blog)

Filming has wrapped on Water For Elephants starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon. It’s scheduled for release on April 15, 2011. Sara Gruen’s latest novel, Ape House, is coming out on September 7, 2010 to mixed reviews. It’s about apes in a research lab who are taught to communicate using American Sign Language. (EarlyWord)

Watch the trailer for Freakonomics over at Daemon’s Movies. It will be released On Demand, Apple iTunes, Xbox Live, Playstation, Amazon and Vudu on September 3rd, before it opens in theaters on October 1st.

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Two unpublished stories by the late novelist Stieg Larsson have been discovered in Sweden. The science fiction tales “The Crystal Balls” and “The Flies” were received by the Swedish National Library as part of a private donation in 2007. When Larsson was 17 years old, he sent the two stories to Jules Verne, a science fiction magazine in Sweden. The magazines rejected the work.

Larsson was in the midst of writing his Millennium series when he died of a heart attack at the very young age of 50. The completed books in the series are “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”. He was writing the fourth novel when his untimely death occurred.

The Swedish National Library’s spokesperson, Hakan Farje thinks that Larsson’s heirs have the right to decide whether to publish the stories.

(Source: CBS News)

In an interesting article in The Observer, Tom Lamont wonders why books are given different covers for each country they are published in, something not done for other types of media like movies and CDs. He interviews a few cover designers who attribute the changes in a book’s cover as an attempt to capture the cultural sensibilities of each individual country. However, at least one of the designers he talked to is skeptical “about book buyers being so different in each country that they require different covers.”

International cover design is something that came to my attention after reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (read my review here). The US version seemed harmless with it’s brightly colored cover and benign title, so I was shocked by the horrific violence that it contained. After reading it, I discovered the original Swedish title was “Men Who Hate Women” and in Sweden it was published with a more graphic cover. Take a look at the US cover on the above left and the Swedish cover on the right (Photo above).

It’s hard to believe they’re both the same book, right? I understand why they changed it (I can’t see the Swedish cover selling well in the US) but I don’t think the pretty colors capture the essence of the book AT ALL. In fact, I felt duped by the cover-like I had been sold one thing, but actually got another. I get that the publisher wanted to market The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo differently in the US, I just think they went a little too far and actually tried to obscure the true nature of the book.

So even though I think they changed the cover too much in the case of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I do think they needed to change it if they wanted it to sell in the US. But not all books necessitate a cover change abroad. While searching online, I must have seen four different covers for The Brightest Star in the Sky by Irish author Marian Keyes, each one a bland variation on a star theme. I think in that case, one cover would have sufficed.

Have you ever read a book with a cover that didn’t match the content? Have you noticed differences in book covers in your country versus internationally? Leave a comment below!

Here are some book related stories that have been in the news this week:

Entertainment Weekly has the first chapter of the Twilight parody, Nightlight. (EW)

Mattie Stepanek’s mother, Jeni, has written a new book about his life. Good Morning America has an excerpt. (GMA)

Are ebooks and the price war changing the publishing industry? (PBS)

The family of Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is battling over his estate. Things are complicated because he and his girlfriend of 32 years never married and he didn’t leave a will. (The Guardian)

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s final Anne of Green Gables book reveals a darker side of the Blythes. (The Globe and Mail)

10 cool bookends for the bibliophile in your life. The Star Wars trash compactor bookends are awesome. (Oddee)

The top 5 books on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List:
THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown
THE SCARPETTA FACTOR, by Patricia Cornwell
PURSUIT OF HONOR, by Vince Flynn
NINE DRAGONS, by Michael Connelly
THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett

Up until I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, I imagined Sweden as a peaceful, tranquil country. Now I have a vision of Sweden as a country plagued by corruption, racism, misogyny, and horrific violence against women. I purchased this book on a whim without knowing much about it, and I was surprised by the graphic violence. Had I known the original Swedish title was “Men Who Hate Women,” I might have been clued in sooner.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo centers on Mikael Blomkvist, a financial reporter and amateur investigator, who was recently convicted of libel and is facing a hefty fine and a few months in jail. Out of options, he accepts a job offer from Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of his niece, Harriet, over forty years ago. Harriet disappeared during a large family gathering on an island when she was sixteen, and every year since then Henrik has received an anonymous package in the mail on his birthday. Even though decades have passed, Vanger is haunted by Harriet’s disappearance and the fact that, despite every effort, no trace of her has ever been found. Blomkvist discovers that the Vanger family has a lot of skeletons in the closet, including Nazis, alcoholics, and abusers, just to name a few.

Blomkvist is aided in researching this cold case by talented private investigator Lisbeth Salander, a troubled twenty-four year old woman with antisocial tendencies. Her tattoos, piercings, and goth-like appearance are deceiving because she is a brilliant investigator. Although she is in her twenties, she is a ward of the state because of emotional problems and a history of being abused. Some see her only as a victim, but the abuse she has suffered has made her tough and full of vengeance. Since the system has failed her so many times, she sees vigilante justice as her only option.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is perplexing because it is almost like three novels in one – there is the financial investigation and libel lawsuit, the disappearance of Harriet, and the saga of the Vanger family. The book gets off to a slow start by giving the reader lots of information about the world of finance that I didn’t find particularly interesting. The good news is that eventually the story gets going and the whodunit aspect of the novel is just wonderful. Harriet disappears from an island so there are a limited number of potential suspects, mostly family. I thoroughly enjoyed Blomkvist’s investigation and trying to guess the identity of the culprit.

My main problem with book was the grisly crimes and the shocking violence against women that takes place. I applaud the author for highlighting the problem of domestic violence and misogyny, but doesn’t presenting the violent deaths of women for entertainment purposes just contribute to the problem? I frequently read murder mystery novels and don’t consider myself that squeamish, but I had trouble reading parts of this book. I also just had to roll my eyes as multiple women throw themselves at Blomkvist (apparently the boring financial reporter is just irresistible) because it didn’t seem believable at all. Despite the slow beginning and my other issues with it, I did become completely absorbed in the story.

Unfortunately, Stieg Larsson passed away shortly before The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was published. Before he died, he wrote three books featuring these characters. The next book in the series, The Girl Who Played With Fire, will be available on July 28, 2009 (you can pre-order it on Amazon.

Buy The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson on Amazon by clicking here.