Ebooks get high-profile convert

LONDON - In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's hero, the academic Robert Langdon, unearths the truth behind the Holy Grail, and in Angels and Demons he exposes a secret religious society.

Now, with the third book in the series, Brown himself is poised to save the ailing publishing industry, pushing the business into an electronic era.

His new novel The Lost Symbol is out on international release on September 15 and has a print run of 6 million and one of the largest orders in the history of publishing.

Another thriller with mystic overtones, its plot has been worked on by Brown over five years with a secrecy equalled only by that of its marketing team.

Last week, as the title arrived at number four on Amazon's bestseller chart, Brown's American publishers, Knopf DoubleDay, announced that an ebook of the title will be released simultaneously.

With more than 81 million copies of The Da Vinci Code sold across the world, industry hopes for the transformative power of this new title may be justified.

"Even more than J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter titles, Dan Brown has shown that a book can become genuinely mass market and this helped keep supermarkets' interest and helped publishers develop their methods, especially online," said Joel Rickett, editorial director of Penguin's Viking Books.

"The Da Vinci Code kept changing what was expected of the readership.

"People would think everyone who was ever going to buy that book had already bought it and then, the next week, 20,000 more would sell, and another 30,000 after that."

Rickett said he publishes an ebook simultaneously with all his titles now and that this is linked to new online marketing strategies.

"Books are getting much better at using the internet to create excitement, like films do," he said.

This summer Rickett has watched online interest in Viking Books' sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Eoin Colfer, translate into heavy orders for the book well before its publication.

The technology that allows readers to read books on a handheld screen is improving just at the moment Brown's The Lost Symbol hits the streets. For Rickett the possibilities, including books with scored soundtracks and video inserts, are just becoming clear.

"The ebook is quickly becoming a publishing reality and The Lost Symbol will be one of the fastest-selling books of recent times," he said.

"Once people can flip between books, look up references online and switch to an audio reading, everything will change."

Literary agent Karolina Sutton is already halfway there. "I love my [Sony] reader," she said.

"But it does feel like a prototype. Like any new technology, it has its limitations. It's not fun to run out of power as the protagonist is about to reveal a deadly secret."

Some American authors, particularly in the crime and the business genres, already sell a third of their copies as ebooks.

But, although the new Brown title will be a huge publicity boost for the ebook, the industry knows that by far the biggest readership will be on paper.

Will this translate into wider sales for other printed books? "Pretty soon rival book stores will start discounting editions to draw people in. It can't help but rub off to some degree," said Rickett.

- OBSERVER