New Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Two years from now -- perhaps three -- you will stop and remember this day. You will be at a saturation point with everything to do with Freemasons and you’ll think back fondly to the point in time when you had only the vaguest idea of what one was. (“Free who?”) You’ll be tired of hearing how wonderful Dan Brown’s books are. You’ll be tired of hearing how stinky they are. You’ll be weary of hearing how this author is single-handedly rescuing a genre. And you’ll be fed up with hearing about how he’s killing it.

While the brouhaha is fairly new and meltingly hot, however, consider this interesting stuff: in North America, The Lost Symbol’s first run of five million copies is the largest ever. And in a bold move for a big publisher, Random House is releasing the hard cover and the e-book versions of The Lost Symbol at the same time, providing a big, visible test case around e-books at a time when such things are of extreme interest. (Don’t ever forget: the sky? It’s falling.)