'Inheritance' has great start, pushes 'Steve Jobs' out of #1 spot

Released only two days ago, Christopher Paolini's final installment of the 'Inheritance' cycle has sold nearly half a million copies and has taken top spot on Amazon.com.

As of Thursday afternoon, 'Inheritance' was sitting on top, pushing Walter Isaacson's bestseller, 'Steve Jobs', into second place, a placement it had been holding for nearly two months, reports The Associated Press. On Thursday, Random House Children's Books announced that 'Inheritance' had sold 489,500 copies, including hardcover, audio and e-books, on its first day. Author Christopher Paolini started writing the fantasy series with the first book 'Eragon', at the age of 15, after graduating from high school. His parents published the book through their company Paolini International LLC in 2002. A year later it was re-published by Knopf and went on to be a bestseller. 'Eragon' was made into a movie in 2006 and starred Edward Speleers, Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich. The movie earned $249 million worldwide, making it the 16th highest grossing movie of the year. The second book, 'Eldest' was published in 2005 and the third book, 'Brisingr' in 2008. Having concluded the series, The Bookseller reports that Paolini plans to write science-fiction next. With 'Inheritance' sitting at 300,000 words, Paolini tells The Bookseller in a recent interview that his next book will be a short story. Talking about the end of the series, Paolini said, "This is a coming of age story and I didn't want to be too far away from that when I was writing it." Paolini has dedicated the last 13 years of his life to the series and will soon be 28. He added, "I want to move into a longer term career where each book may be not as popular as Eragon but may be popular in its own right." Paolini wants to accomplish other tasks first, but admits he left some of the story line open for at least 3 more separate books. He states that building the series was a lot of work and it would be a "shame" not to work on them again. He also hints that he would like to try his hand at producing a video game that "may or may not" be related to the story of Eragon. Despite the success of 'Inheritance', sales are not quite as high as the third book in the series was on its opening day. 'Brisingr' sold almost 70,000 more copies on it's first day. Random House spokeswoman Judith Haut believes that the bankruptcy of Borders is to blame, reports The Associated Press.