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Record British sales for final Potter book
2007-07-24
The seventh and final Harry Potter book became the fastest-selling work in British history by shifting over two and a half million copies during its first 24 hours on sale, the publisher said Monday. A total of 2,652,656 copies of "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows" were sold from 2301 GMT Friday, Bloomsbury said, quoting Nielsen BookScan, an independent book trade monitoring service. Although they had predicted it would sell three million, the figure still beat the previous record set by its series predecessor, "Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince," which sold just over two million. In Germany, Bloomsbury said it sold 398,271 copies of the English language edition in the same period. But these figures were dwarfed by sales in the United States, where the book shifted around 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours. Bloomsbury said in a statement that the Potter event was the "most astoundingly successful book launch ever" despite a series of leaks of the book in the days leading up to its release. Figures from individual retailers in Britain further illustrated the speedy rate at which the books flew off the shelves. WH Smith sold 15 books per second on the launch night, while over 7,000 people queued outside Waterstone's in central London to buy the book. "We are staggered by the speed of the sale," a spokesman said, adding it was "absolutely record breaking." The book's author, J.K. Rowling, who wrote the first in the series as a single mother receiving state benefits, has made an estimated one billion dollars (725 million euros) from her work and is now richer than Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. Some 325 million copies of the first six volumes have been sold worldwide, and translated into 64 languages.
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