A Taiwanese publisher and an e-book service provider have jointly launched a pre-order campaign for the Chinese edition of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy of erotic novels, aiming to use the British bestsellers to boost sales.
Far EasTone Telecommunications, Taiwan’s No. 3 mobile provider, expects to see the number of members of its e-book service double and revenues for the service to triple this month from a year ago, said Josiane Hsu, the company’s marketing director.
Although the books have been described as “mummy porn” and rated as restricted, “we’re very confident the trilogy can increase our sales substantially,” Hsu said.
Since its launch in 2010, Far EasTone’s e-book platform has garnered about 300,000 members who have downloaded around 2.5 million books, she said.
The Taipei-based Star East Publications, which bought the copyrights for the trilogy, also expressed optimism over sales of the print version.
Fanny Yang (楊秀真), Star East’s chief editor, declined to reveal how much her company paid for the rights, saying only that it is by far the highest price her company has ever paid for a series of foreign novels.
“We’re confident it’s worth it,” she said.
The novels have become bestsellers worldwide and are especially popular among married women, with the first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, selling over 534,000 copies in the UK, according to industry publication The Bookseller.
The series has sold 31 million copies worldwide and has set the record as the fastest-selling paperback of all time, surpassing even the Harry Potter series.
The Fifty Shades trilogy, notable for its explicit content involving bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism, features a relationship between billionaire Christian Grey and a literature student, Anastasia Steele.
The first book’s Chinese edition will hit stores on Aug. 24. The second book, Fifty Shades Darker, is expected to be available in mid-November and the third book, Fifty Shades Freed, is set to be released in early February next year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching