How Long Will the Da Vinci Code Phenomenon Last?

For book publishers, the most provocative question raised by the upcoming movie version of "The Da Vinci Code" is: Can a three-year-old best seller that has already been endlessly milked for profits yield one more windfall for the industry?

With the film opening in May, the publishing industry is placing one of its biggest bets ever on the staying power of a blockbuster book. Publishers are using the movie's release to anchor numerous "Da Vinci"-related titles and tie-ins, including the novel's first U.S. paperback run. And all of them are trying to harness the selling power of the most successful novel in recent memory, with an estimated 40 million copies in print world-wide.

The pile-on is a common model in the book world, but "Da Vinci" is having an unusually long run of tie-ins. "The publishing industry sees something that's working and keeps doing it until it keels over," says Robert Miller, president of Walt Disney's Hyperion book-publishing unit. "When angels were hot, the first 40 books about them succeeded. Then not. The first 20 O.J. Simpson books worked. Then not. The pie is so fixed and the crumbs so thin that when a new area opens, be it the men's movement or computer books, we jump on it."

These new titles range from updated guides to the Dan Brown thriller to new novels with similar "Da Vinci"-like themes. Earlier this month, Pearson's Dutton imprint published 45,000 copies of Raymond Khoury's debut novel "The Last Templar," a thriller with religious overtones. There are now more than 146,000 in print. Next month, Bertelsmann's Ballantine Books will release Steve Berry's "The Templar Legacy"; it is already racking up sizable preorders on Barnes & Noble's Web site. "This is a ripple effect from a cultural phenomenon, no more, no less," says Richard Sarnoff, executive vice president of Bertelsmann's Random House, whose Doubleday imprint originally published "The Da Vinci Code."

But is there still an audience for new Da Vinci books? After all, dozens of titles related to the novel, from Delacorte Press's "Da Vinci Decoded" (September 2004) to Berkley's "The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code" (January 2005) already flooded the market after the book's initial release.