The Hunger Games Ousts Harry Potter As Amazon's Best Seller

The Hunger Games franchise has smashed the record set by the Harry Potter series to become Amazon.com's best-selling series in the online retailer's history, the company announced on Friday (August 18, 2012). Sara Nelson, the editorial director of books and Kindle at Amazon, told reporters, "Since debuting in 2008, Katniss Everdeen and the Hunger Games have taken the world by storm, much as Harry Potter did a decade before."

The book series follows 16-year-old heroine Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence in the recent movie), who lives in a post-apocalyptic North America, now one large nation called Panem. The nation's capital, originally named The Capitol, is a highly advanced metropolis that hosts the annual 'Hunger Games' during which one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each of the twelve districts are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle to the death until only one person remains.

The slightly more adult theme to the book can perhaps be one of the main attributes toward the franchise's success, giving it a broader readership to surpass the number of readers that Jk Rowling's wizarding tales reached. Author Suzanne Collins has yet to announce plans for a follow-up novel to 2010's Mockingjay, although is believed to no longer be interested in drawing out the trilogy any further.