9-11 report becomes instant best seller

NEW YORK – The report by the Sept. 11 Commission has overcome its 588 pages of dense text to climb the best-seller list, ranking No. 1 in online sales Friday at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Bookstores on Thursday sold an estimated 150,000 copies of “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” said W. Drake McFeely, president of the publishing house W.W. Norton & Co.

“We’ve achieved the stated goal of commission chairman Thomas Kean – to get the report in the hands of the American people,” said Norton’s McFeely.

“In half a day, we’ve sold enough books to call it a best seller,” he said, though he cautions it is difficult to project a book’s future sales based solely on its first-day performance. Friday’s sales figures were not available.

Publication of the $10 paperback coincided with the release Thursday of the report by a bipartisan panel on the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history. Citing multiple government failures, the commission called for a national counterterrorism center headed by a Cabinet-level director to centralize intelligence efforts.

“It’s probably the most important document that will come out in my lifetime, potentially,” said Noah Haiduc-Dale, 27, a doctoral student in Middle Eastern studies who bought the book at a Borders bookstore in Manhattan.

Bookstores nationwide have ordered more than 500,000 copies of an initial printing of 600,000, and there were no immediate plans for another printing, said McFeely, the Norton executive.

The release of the findings along with the book has had a ripple effect on sales of other books related to the terrorist attacks.

“The 9-11 Investigations,” a kind of abridged, annotated summary of the commission’s findings, rose on Amazon.com from a rank of about 5,000 to No. 20 on Thursday.

The book, 40,000 copies of which were published in mid-June by Public Affairs, contains congressional staff reports, transcripts of testimony from key witnesses and excerpts from the House and Senate joint inquiry.

“It’s a preamble to the final report – and we hoped people would be interested in the process,” said Public Affairs spokesman Gene Taft.

Thursday’s release of the report “was a huge bump for us,” he said.