“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has, as expected, broken all known and independently validated UK book sales records for first day sales with an incredible 2,009,574 copies sold through UK bookshops, supermarkets, internet sites, and newspapers on its first day of release — Saturday 16 July 2005. This figure includes consumer sales from non-panel members, such as book clubs. Further sales will have been made to libraries, schools and institutions.
Fans of the Harry Potter series have been waiting since June 2003 to find out what happens next and it appears from the first day sales that two years has never seemed so long!
In July 2003, sales of the hardback editions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix broke all records with 1,777,541 units in its first day’s sales through the UK Total Consumer Market (TCM) and also included 1st day sales from non-panel members, such as book clubs.
Nielsen BookScan oversees the book trade Gold & Platinum awards, for which a Gold is awarded at 0.5 million copies and a Platinum at 1 million copies sold. Richard Knight, Managing Director of Nielsen BookScan said “Typically a good book will take about four to six months to go Gold and very few books reach Platinum in their first year of publication. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince achieved Platinum in less than one day!”
Sales of all Harry Potter titles monitored by Nielsen BookScan in the UK now total over 19 million copies and worldwide in excess of 52 million!
*Estimate first-day sales of children and adult editions from provisional data received by 9am on Monday 18 July 2005. Full and final figures will be available from 4pm Tuesday 19 July 2005.
For further information contact Kim Crooke at Nielsen BookScan – direct line 01483 712222.
Notes for Editors:-
Nielsen BookScan is the book trade’s independent continuous retail sales monitoring service providing the most authoritative and reliable source of books sales information in the UK. Nielsen BookScan provides weekly book sales figures to the media (best seller charts), publishers, bookshops and other industry observers.
Nielsen BookScan provides accurate consumer sales information on all titles selling in the UK through retail channels. The Total Consumer Market (TCM) includes direct from till sales from outlets such as Borders, Books Etc, Ottakar’s, Waterstone’s, WH Smith, Independents, Asda, Tesco, Woolworths, plus academic campus shops, travel outlets, off the page and the internet — a group worth £1.6bn of sales annually. Nielsen BookScan does not measure sales to institutions such as libraries, schools, etc.
Nielsen BookScan countries of coverage are UK, USA, Australia, Ireland and South Africa.” News from bloomsbury.com
Video Clips (windows media player) :
–Launch at Edinburgh Castle 
