By Siobhan O’Leary

Responding to the phenomenal sales of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol in the US, Brown’s German publisher Lübbe has ordered an additional 400,000 copies on top of original 800,000 copy first printing, BuchMarkt reports. The US edition is said to have sold over a million copies in the first 24 hours. As for the fear that sales of the English edition in Germany will cannibalize sales of the German edition when it is released in four weeks, Lübbe claims that Brown’s new book is a more challenging read than its predecessor or a Harry Potter book and that people will wait for the German edition. Online book retailer Weltbild.de is offering a free peek at the first chapter of the German edition of The Lost Symbol. Chapter two and three will also be available there shortly.

As the Wall Street Journal prepares to start charging $2 per week for mobile access to the paper in the next month or two, Germany’s Axel Springer Verlag is planning on putting the same strategy into practice for Bild.de and Welt Online, among other publications. Springer has not yet revealed how much it will charge.