By SARAH BAILEY
USA Today
| |||
 |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
| |||
|
|||
| |||
|
|||
The sudoku craze is pushing a half-dozen puzzle-packed books up best-selling books lists.
The Japanese logic games began appearing widely in U.S. newspapers this summer, including The Honolulu Advertiser, and have become the morning brain breakfast for millions of commuters.
Three weeks ago, no sudoku (sue-DOE-koo) books were in USA Today's top 150. Now, there are six.
"We haven't seen anything like this in a long time," says Melisa Duffy, marketing director for "Su Doku for Dummies," which rocketed to the top spot in the "Dummies" catalog of 900 active titles in just two weeks. It's No. 96 on USA Today's list.
Trailing a slew of sudoku books in England, American publishers are popping out compilations as fast as they can:
"Once the puzzles got out there, they kind of ran wild," says Overlook Press' John Mark Boling, publicist for "The Book of Sudoku." "It seems like all the major houses and then some have a book coming out."
Publishers say the craze has been magnified this summer as Americans snapped up books to take along on vacation, and teachers and doctors began recommending the games as mind sharpeners for all ages.
Sudoku ("single number") involves no math. The objective: to fill a grid of 81 boxes, divided into nine three-by-three squares, so that every row, column and square contains the digits 1 through 9.
"My first thought was that this must be a flash in the pan," Boling says. "But it's been snowballing since then."
There's more to come: This week, Newmarket released "The Big Book of Su Doku No. 1" with an initial printing of 70,000 copies and heavy advance orders.
Newmarket also introduces the puzzle to kids in September with "Junior Su Doku," which shrinks the puzzle size and sometimes uses words or symbols in place of numbers.
The sales outlook for sudoku as a category is "phenomenal," Gould says. The United States is "a bigger market, and the craze in the newspapers is just as strong as it was in England six months ago."
