Harry Potter breaks all bookselling records
Harry Potter breaks all bookselling records
By Ben Fenton, Media Correspondent
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: July 24 2007 03:38 | Last updated: July 24 2007 03:38
Harry Potter has broken all bookselling records, according to figures released on Tuesday. The seventh and final instalment of JK Rowling’s series about the young wizard sold 2.6m copies in its first 24 hours in the UK and an astonishing 8.3m in the US.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more than 400,000 English-language copies in Germany, one of 88 other countries in which the book came out on Saturday. At least 128 books a second crossed bookshop counters during the first full day of publication.
Sales of 2,652,656 in the UK marked a 32 per cent increase on the first-day performance of 2,009,574 for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the sixth book of the series, in July 2005.
A leak of the seventh book on the internet seems to have made little dent in sales, despite the fact that some newspapers, including the New York Times, went so far as to publish a review before young readers could get anxious hands on the story.
The news for Bloomsbury, publishers in the UK, and Scholastic, their counterparts in America, was good, and booksellers reported a roaring trade both at special midnight shop-openings and on Saturday and Sunday.
The joy for shopkeepers, however, was tempered by the fact that fiercely priced competition meant very little profit, with the biggest booksellers in the world reporting that they would be making pennies, at most, on each copy. Some British supermarkets made a loss of up to £3 per sale in the first hours of Saturday.
Meanwhile, a reading of the book at midnight on Saturday morning by JK Rowling was watched in an online-streamed version by 372,000 people.
If her personal deal with Scholastic and Bloomsbury came close to an industry average, she was at the time earning approximately £96 for every word she read.
By Ben Fenton, Media Correspondent
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: July 24 2007 03:38 | Last updated: July 24 2007 03:38
Harry Potter has broken all bookselling records, according to figures released on Tuesday. The seventh and final instalment of JK Rowling’s series about the young wizard sold 2.6m copies in its first 24 hours in the UK and an astonishing 8.3m in the US.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more than 400,000 English-language copies in Germany, one of 88 other countries in which the book came out on Saturday. At least 128 books a second crossed bookshop counters during the first full day of publication.
Sales of 2,652,656 in the UK marked a 32 per cent increase on the first-day performance of 2,009,574 for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the sixth book of the series, in July 2005.
A leak of the seventh book on the internet seems to have made little dent in sales, despite the fact that some newspapers, including the New York Times, went so far as to publish a review before young readers could get anxious hands on the story.
The news for Bloomsbury, publishers in the UK, and Scholastic, their counterparts in America, was good, and booksellers reported a roaring trade both at special midnight shop-openings and on Saturday and Sunday.
The joy for shopkeepers, however, was tempered by the fact that fiercely priced competition meant very little profit, with the biggest booksellers in the world reporting that they would be making pennies, at most, on each copy. Some British supermarkets made a loss of up to £3 per sale in the first hours of Saturday.
Meanwhile, a reading of the book at midnight on Saturday morning by JK Rowling was watched in an online-streamed version by 372,000 people.
If her personal deal with Scholastic and Bloomsbury came close to an industry average, she was at the time earning approximately £96 for every word she read.
posted by Carlos T Mock at 8:23 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home