[pp.int.general] Fwd: [Fanac] Harry Potter's Popularity Holds Up in Early Sales

[Amelia Andersdotter]

Notice the 3rd paragraph in particular. "numerous leaks ... failed to dent"

As a bookworm I can honestly say that it's never crossed my mind to
read any lengthier text even in the most eye-friendly format online.

I'm only bringing it up because it's so strange that *they* would
bring it up, seeing as it's so obvious that no book-lover would read
bad photo-copies, and no non-booklover would ever read it anyway.

//amelia

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Daniel Atterbom <daniel at hundens.se>
Date: 28-Jul-2007 11:49
Subject: [Fanac] Harry Potter's Popularity Holds Up in Early Sales
To: Fanac <fanac at lists.lysator.liu.se>



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/books/23potter.html?8bu&emc=bu

July 23, 2007

Harry Potter's Popularity Holds Up in Early Sales
By MOTOKO RICH


In its first 24 hours on sale, "Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows," the seventh and final installment in the wildly popular
series by J. K. Rowling that officially went on sale at 12:01 a.m.
Saturday, sold 8.3 million copies in the United States, according to
Scholastic Inc., the publisher.

That exceeded the 6.9 million copies that "Harry Potter and the
Half-Blood Prince," the sixth in the series, sold in its first 24
hours on sale two years ago.

The figures seemed to show that numerous leaks before the official
release, including photos of every page of the book that circulated
on Internet file-sharing services last week, had failed to dent the
enormous pent-up demand for the book.

On Friday night, booksellers and fans threw parties to herald the
book's release, and at many outlets in New York and elsewhere, lines
stretched around the block with shoppers waiting to be among the
first to buy the book shortly after midnight.

  "The excitement, anticipation, and just plain hysteria that came
over the entire country this weekend was a bit like the Beatles'
first visit to the U.S.," Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic's
trade and book fairs division, said in a statement.

The Arthur A. Levine imprint at Scholastic printed 12 million copies
of "Deathly Hallows." That brings the number of "Harry Potter" books
in print in the United States to 133.5 million.

Before the publication of "Deathly Hallows," the six other books in
the series had sold about 325 million copies worldwide. The series is
published by Bloomsbury in Britain.

Many of the books were sold at a substantial discount. Barnes &
Noble, for example, was selling "Deathly Hallows" at 40 percent off
the $34.99 cover price, or $20.99. Amazon.com was selling it for
$17.99. The estimate of first-day sales indicates that at an average
selling price of about $20, Americans spent $166 million for the book
in one day. Many booksellers will make only slim profits on the
book's sales.

  Separately, the Borders Group announced that it had sold about 1.2
million copies of the book globally in its more than 1,200 Borders
and Waldenbooks stores on Saturday. Most of those stores held
midnight parties, and Borders estimated that about 800,000 people
attended them worldwide. The sales figure exceeded the 850,000 copies
of "Half-Blood Prince" that Borders sold on the first day of its
sales two years ago.



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