Lost Symbol's Record Sales

Who says book publishers are dying? Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, out Tuesday, sold more than one million hardcover copies in its first 24 hours. It broke Barnes & Noble’s all-time record for first-day sales in adult fiction, as well as snagging the record for the highest number of preorders in the company’s history. The electronic version of the book also holds the number one spot on Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com. The Lost Symbol, which succeeds The Da Vinci Code continues to chronicle the adventures of symbologist Robert Langdon. In Langdon’s third adventure, he travels to Washington, DC to save the kidnapped head of the Smithsonian Institution. Doubleday has printed five million copies of The Lost Symbol in the first run alone, and U.K. Publisher Transworld will print 1 million.