Live Wire

Britney Spears is still hot. But how hot? Her new album,Femme Fatale has become her sixth No. 1 on the US pop chart. That puts her in lofty company: the only women to have that many No. 1 albums are Mariah Carey,Janet Jackson,Madonna and Barbra Streisand. And the video for the album8217;s first single,Hold It Against Me,had been viewed nearly 33 million times on YouTube as of Wednesday afternoon. Yet sales for the album were relatively low for a superstar like Spears. The album sold 276,000 copies in the US,a significant drop from the opening-week sales for her last album,Circus,which sold 506,000 when it was released in 2008.

J. J. Abrams,the director of Star Trek and a creator of the television series Lost,Alias and Felicity,is now working on his first novel. The publisher Little,Brown said on Wednesday that it had acquired a book that Abrams had conceived and will be written by Doug Dorst,the author of the supernatural crime novel Alive in Necropolis. Abrams said in a statement that Doug is a genius, adding that he could not be more excited to collaborate with him on this completely original project. Just what that project is neither Abrams nor Little,Brown is indicating,except to say that it is planned for a fall 2012 release.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by the Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson,has sold more than a million copies in its digital format, Knopf,a New York publishing house said on Thursday. The combined digital sales for all three books in the blockbuster Millennium series,which includes The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest,is now more than three million copies. The trilogy is selling at a clip of more than 500,000 copies a month in all formats. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,which went on sale in the United States in September 2008,has sold more than 300,000 copies in hardcover.