With their availability in hardcover, 50 Shades will complete an almost entirely reversed traditional publishing cycle. The books started out as Twilight fan fiction posted online. A tiny Australian publisher then released them as ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, selling about 250,000 copies. Random House snapped up the rights in a seven-figure deal, rereleased the ebooks and made 50 Shades widely available in paperback for the first time — where it achieved stratospheric success. Finally, a little under a year later, the books will be released in their most expensive format: The hardcover list price is $26.95 per book, USA Today reports (though that will surely be slashed by retailers like Amazon and there will be a three-book bundle for $80.85.

Random House Doubleday publisher Anne Messitte told USA Today that readers had asked for the hardcover editions and that these books will be “the ultimate collector’s editions.” Each book has a ribbon for marking its place and an embossed author’s signature on the cover — not high-end enhancements, but a way to make the books somewhat special while keeping them at a standard hardcover price.

The 50 Shades publishing cycle could prove a model for self-published romance titles that became popular as ebooks and are then bought by traditional publishers. Until now, such books have been released only in paperback editions, with the assumption that fans who might have bought the self-published books for just a couple of dollars would be reluctant to pay much more in print. If the 50 Shades hardcovers are a success, though, publishers might feel emboldened to consider hardcover editions of more originally self-published titles. 50 Shades hasn’t just turned the notion of what can be a bestseller on its head — it might show that readers’ ideas of what is “worth” a collectible or hardcover edition have shifted as well.

“The Hunger Games” is published by Scholastic, which reported in July that the trilogy has sold over 50 million copies in the United States. Amazon did not break out how many copies it has sold.

“Since debuting in 2008, Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games have taken the world by storm, much as Harry Potter did a decade before,” Sara Nelson, Amazon.com editorial director of books and Kindle, said in the release. “Interestingly, this series is only three books versus Harry Potter’s seven, and to achieve this result in just four years is a great testament to both the popularity of the work and, we think, the growth in reading digitally during that time. Customers love these books and all three titles are consistently on our Top 10 lists in both print and Kindle formats, and The Hunger Games is also the most-borrowed book in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.”

Amazon UK announced earlier this month that E. L. James, author of erotic trilogy “50 Shades of Grey,” is Amazon UK’s bestselling author of all time, beating Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling.

As of July, the 50 Shades trilogy had sold 20 million copies in the United States, with sales roughly split between print and digital formats.

The Bookseller says that 50 Shades of Grey has sold 3.8 million copies in print according to Nielsen BookScan, which would suggest 1.5 million ebooks sold. (An earlier version of this article suggested that those were the actual sales figures, but Random House UK would not confirm them.) That actually means it’s sold fewer print copies than J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which sold 4 million copies in print. The Harry Potter ebooks were not available until this year, and Rowling is selling them separately through her own website, Pottermore.com — so we don’t yet have a comparable figure for how many  copies a single Harry Potter title has sold in both print and digital formats. (I’ve asked Pottermore if they can share any information.)

E.L. James published the 50 Shades trilogy with a small Australian publisher before the rights were snapped up by Random House on both sides of the Atlantic in April. The books started out as Twilight fan fiction posted in full on FF.net. The three ebooks had sold over 250,000 copies together and hit the top spots on the New York Times ebook fiction bestseller list before Random House bought the rights. Random House UK is not including those 250,000 copies in its overall sales figure. It’s unclear if Random House UK is including those earlier ebook sales in its figure, and I’ve asked for clarification.

Separately, Amazon announced this week that E.L. James is “the #1 bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk, eclipsing J.K. Rowling’s total sales.” Amazon said James has sold over two million ebooks at Amazon UK since April.

Amazon announced it was selling more ebooks than print books in the U.S. in May 2011 — 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. “We hit this milestone in the US less than four years after introducing Kindle,” Jorrit Van der Meulen, VP of Kindle EU says in the release, “so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable and shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle.”

Free Kindle books are excluded, but “if included would make the number even higher.” The Kindle UK store includes nearly 1.4 million ebooks.

A couple other facts from the release, which heavily promotes Amazon’s ebook self-publishing service KDP:

• Amazon says that UK Kindle readers buy four times more books than they did before owning a Kindle.
• E.L. James, author of the “50 Shades of Grey” trilogy, is “the #1 bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk, eclipsing JK Rowling’s total sales.” She sold over two million Kindle books at Amazon UK in four months.

In May, UK bookstore chain Waterstones partnered with Amazon to sell Kindle e-readers in its nearly 300 stores.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Amazon UK’s ebook-print book ratio. I apologize for the error.

As Andrew Rhomberg of Jellybooks noted on Twitter, a would-be parody of 50 Shades of Grey called 50 Shades of Black & Blue by I B Naughtie (ha ha) has risen to #41 on the Amazon Kindle Store’s UK Bestseller list despite terrible reviews. Not far behind it is another “parody” called 50 Shades of Red, White & Blue by Maggie Muff (again, ha ha).

In the case of the “Black & Blue” parody, the customer reviews are beyond scathing. Readers blast the work as unfunny, badly written and too short or else complain that they purchased it by mistake. Reviews for its comedic competitor are better (though one wonders about their legitimacy — i.e., “I have read many many books but i have never ever came across one as funny as this.”)

In the bigger picture, the 50 Shades imitators raise questions about how digital authors and Amazon will respond to the problem of parody in the e-book age. Rip-offs masquerading as parodies are nothing new, of course — recall the late JD Salinger’s recent lawsuit to shut down “60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye.” The problem is that real parody is an essential element of free expression and that courts are rightfully reluctant to use copyright law to suppress genuine social commentary.

In the past, a parody publisher had to invest considerable money into printing costs while the publisher of the original could go to court to challenge any blatant rip-offs. Now it costs next to nothing for an opportunist to quickly publish a thin imitation of a bestseller and then slap a “parody” label on it (and hide beyond the shield of free expression). Meanwhile, the original author is unlikely to have the legal resources to challenge a dozen instant imitators.

This leaves the question of Amazon’s role in policing parodies. The company already has a spotty track record in screening for out-and-out forgeries, but that is a different issue from the parody question. Amazon should not have to be in a position of deciding the tricky legal question of what is a parody and what is not. The solution may instead lie in the retailer employing an authentication service that highlights original works and slaps disclaimers on imitators.

This week’s featured title: ”Bared to You” by Sylvia Day. It’s #20 on the New York Times e-book bestsellers list this week and

What it’s about: The first in a trilogy, this erotic novel tells the story of a recent college grad, Eva, who meets billionaire businessman Gideon.

How it became a bestseller: Day self-published “Bared to You” on April 3, 2012. The book immediately invited comparisons to “50 Shades of Grey,” the originally self-published erotic trilogy that Random House’s Vintage acquired for seven figures in March and that has now sold over 10 million copies. Jane Litte, who runs the romance blog “Dear Author,” writes that “if I were to recommend any book today to readers who enjoyed 50 Shades and was looking for another book like it, this would be the first one I would offer. However, Bared to You is far better written with much hotter sex scenes.”

Like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Bared to You” has now found a traditional publisher: Penguin’s Berkley imprint snapped it up this month and has already released the e-book with a new, “50 Shades of Grey”-esque cover. (That’s Day’s original cover on the left and Penguin’s cover on the right.) Penguin will release a paperback edition on June 6. (Day writes a bit more about the Penguin acquisition here, and notes that Penguin’s ability to get the paperback into bricks-and-mortar bookstores was one of the main reasons she signed up with them.)

“Bared to You” is $5.99 on … Amazon  | Barnes & Noble  | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 6/3/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/24/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

Vintage paid seven figures to republish E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, which was first published in book form last year by a small Australian publisher. Before that, the trilogy appeared in a slightly different form, under the title Master of the Universe, on fan fiction site FF.net.

Sarah Weinman at Publishers Marketplace reported yesterday (subscription required) that Vintage publisher Anne Messitte called 50 Shades of Grey and Master of the Universe “two distinctly separate pieces of work.”

Today Jane Litte, who runs the popular romance blog “Dear Author,” compares 50 Shades of Grey to Master of the Universe using a variety of Internet tools, and finds that the works are quite similar — 89 percent the same, according to plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn.

“With the success of Alternate Universe fan fiction and the successful leveraging of that fandom into seven-figure economic rewards, the influx of fan fiction into professional publishing is likely to begin at greater levels than previous,” Litte writes. She says it’s important to state a book’s provenance: “It’s an indicator to readers that they may have encountered this before and it gives the fandom that propelled the author to success a nod. At the very least it’s courteous. At the most, it’s truthful advertising.” She’ll be running a series of posts on fan fiction and copyright, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

The fact that 50 Shades of Grey is extremely similar to Master of the Universe, a work that was previously free online, is not the only issue here. To me, the fact that Master of the Universe was once free and available isn’t that problematic: Many people who are reading the book now would never have encountered it in its previous form online; there’s value in packaging something into a print or e-book (people still pay for print copies of Pride and Prejudice even though that’s a public-domain work free in its entirety on the Internet); and honestly, if a publisher can get readers to pay, more power to ‘em.

For me, one question is: How similar is 50 Shades of Grey to Twilight (not very unless Twilight contains a major bondage and sadomasochism element that I missed)? All sorts of works take inspiration from other works — everything from the movie Clueless (based on Jane Austen’s Emma) to books like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Hours. (Twilight is a lot more recent than Jane Eyre and Mrs. Dalloway, of course — its author is still alive and writing — and that makes things a little more complicated.)

More importantly, as more fan fiction gets monetized in book form, will other copyright issues arise? At “Dear Author,” commenter Merrian writes, “What we risk missing is considering and building some consensus about what is fair use and what is the ethical way of going about using fan fiction outside the realms of creating and making it because work that arises in fandom’s often has a collaborative and shared conception.”

50 Shades of Grey is the first title in a trilogy by British author E. L. James. This morning, the NYT reports (in what is currently the most-emailed article on the site) that the book has “electrified women across the country, who have spread the word like gospel on Facebook pages, at school functions and in spin classes…conversation about the book online has fed many of the sales.” Over 250,000 copies have been sold.

Though the NYT mentions the “word-of-mouth excitement” the trilogy has generated and says James “began the trilogy by posting fan fiction online,” the article doesn’t explain its origins in detail. Well-known romance blogs like “Dear Author” and “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” have been covering 50 Shades of Grey since last year. 50 Shades of Grey is hugely popular on social reading site GoodReads, where it was a finalist for “Best Romance” in the 2011 GoodReads Choice Awards. There, it has been rated 6,821 times (with an average star rating of 4.34) and reviewed 1,347 times.

The trilogy was published last year by a small Australian company, Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House. Random House’s Vintage announced today that it paid seven figures for the print and digital rights to the trilogy at auction. The Random House e-book will be available Monday, and a 750,000-copy print run of a redesigned paperback edition will follow. (You can buy the e-book on Kindle and Nook for $9.99 now, but it is still the Writer’s Coffee Shop edition, though the publisher is listed on Amazon as Random House.)

“Dear Author” founder Jane Litte explains the trilogy’s origins:

It was originally published along with the two sequels, Fifty Shades of Darker and Fifty Shades of Freed, in its entirety, as Master of the Universe on ff.net, a site that hosts what is known as fan fiction. Master of the Universe reimagined the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections. This collection of submissions has since been deleted.

She also notes “During the height of its popularity, an auction for the series raised $30,000. The author appeared on a fan fiction panel at the 2010 ComicCon and attended a three day conference in DC thrown by her fans.”

And at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell explains why she thinks the book became so popular:

It has a secrecy element, for example, similar to some paranormal romances and their avid fanbases. It’s also not at all surprising that 50 Shades and Twilight share a few plot themes, specifically that secrecy and the temptation inherent in the world of both narratives, and the alpha male who is opulently, ridiculously wealthy, Volvos optional. Plus, Edward, as I wrote a few years ago, and in many similar ways (again, surprise surprise) Christian are both very much old-skool-style romance heroes. 50 Shades (and Twilight, obviously) are also told from the heroine’s POV, a very deep, first person, detail-heavy point of view, and the narrative is also akin to reading a diary, adding to that sense of illicit secrecy.

But the point of divergence between them is that secret — and this is not to say that at this point 50 Shades become a wholly original piece of fiction. It is not, considering how much of the character types are based on Stephenie Meyer’s work….

Ultimately, I think 50 Shades is popular because of the combination of elements and the foundation it “borrows” from Twilight, among them the very mysterious and barely glimpsed alpha-male point of view, and the presence of a very innocent heroine being inducted into a secret, sexually charged environment. Moreover, the scarcity of paper copies and the absorbing qualities some readers find in the story, as well as their own reactions and desire to share the recommendation with others in an exclusive environment, contribute to the increasing coverage.