Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol sparks supermarket price war

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, the long awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code, has sparked a supermarket price war with one chain cutting the price to £5.

The Lost Symbol is released on Tuesday

The Lost Symbol, which has a recommended retail price of £18.99, is being cut to just £5 by Asda, with Sainsbury's and Morrisons selling the book for between £8 and £9. Tesco will sell The Lost Symbol for £7.

Amazon is selling the book for £9.49.

It is expected that Asda will lose about £4 on every copy of the book. It is not the first time it has used a long-awaited best seller to woo customers into its stores in the hope that they will do the rest of their weekly shopping at the supermarket.

It sold Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at £5 a copy as well.

The Lost Symbol follows the 2003 block-buster The Da Vinci Code, which is believed to be the best selling novel of all time and certainly since records began after World War 2. It sold an estimated 80 million copies worldwide and The Lost Symbol is predicted to eventually match this feat.

The initial print run between 5 to 6.5 million copies will be the largest first printing in publisher Random House's history, with Transworld, the British arm of the company, printing one million hardback copies.

Janine Cook, from Waterstone's, whose London Piccadilly store is the only British shop selling signed copies, said: "It's almost inevitable that this will be the fastest selling fiction hardback of the decade since records began.

"It's Transworld's biggest print run for a hardback novel ever in the UK, and that's one million copies, which is a very bullish thing to do in the economic climate but I think they can be very confident they will be going to a second print run and more after that."

Following the success of The Da Vinci Code, Brown's earlier novels Angels & Demons, Deception Point and Digital Fortress all went on to become multi-million copy international best sellers, and are Britain's second, third and fourth best selling adult paper back novels of all time.

Dewi Williams, Asda's marketing manager for Books, said: "We expect to sell just under twenty thousand copies of The Lost Symbol in the coming week and our customers and colleagues alike are gearing up for one of our biggest book-selling weeks of the year."

Despite the Da Vinci Code's success, it angered scholars, critics and religious officials, with the plot including secret religious cults and speculation Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene.
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