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Brisk Sales for "1984"

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:17PM   
from the buy-used-and-pay-cash dept.

butthurt writes:

CNN Money reports:

The book publisher Penguin is printing more copies of George Orwell's dystopian classic "1984" in response to a sudden surge of demand.

On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning the book was #1 on Amazon's computer-generated list of best-selling books.

[...] "We put through a 75,000 copy reprint this week. That is a substantial reprint and larger than our typical reprint for '1984,'" a Penguin spokesman told CNNMoney Tuesday evening.

[...] According to Nielsen BookScan, which measures most but not all book sales in the United States, "1984" sold 47,000 copies in print since Election Day in November. That is up from 36,000 copies over the same period the prior year.

When the submitter visited amazon.com, the book was ranked #3.

Additional coverage:

• Los Angeles Times
• The New York Times (may be pay-walled)
• 9News
• The Washington Post (owned by the founder of amazon.com)
• The Guardian
• The Man Who Invented the Science Fiction Paperback

Related stories:

Washington DC's Public Library Will Teach People How to Avoid the NSA
George Orwell's "1984" Telescreens are Here...
Traveling to Thailand? Don't Pack George Orwell's "1984"

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Original Submission

• Re:Why this increase in sales? Re:Why this increase in sales? (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:11PM

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:11PM (#459005) Homepage

  As long as you don't mind the dialect/age of the language, Eric Arthur Blair is a superb wordsmith, there shouldn't ever be any issue including one of his works on an English language syllabus. Whilst he wasn't the originator of the more famous quote, he did a set of rules rather like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's that less was more when it came to writing - "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out". Here's a nice little read on Orwell's rules, including the most important final one: http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/07/george-orwell-writing

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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• Re:Why this increase in sales? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:28PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:28PM (#459037)

  "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out"

  If he really did write that exact sentence, he didn't follow it. You can cut quite a few words out of it to obtain: "If possible, always cut a word out." Indeed, a closer look shows that "if possible" is tautological, so it gets: "Always cut a word out."

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