HARRY Potter is ready to cast a spell over the book industry this weekend, as the sixth volume in the boy wizard series looks set to become the world’s biggest-selling novel as soon as it goes on sale.
Billionaire author J.K. Rowling is due to unveil the long-awaited Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at one minute past midnight on Saturday morning at a special ceremony in Edinburgh Castle, Scotland.
At the same time, thousands of other “Potter parties” will transform book shops across Britain into colourful scenes of jubilation as fans, many in fancy dress, scramble to get their hands on the first copies.
On Sunday, Rowling will grant her only press conference – speaking to 70 youngsters, aged 8-16, who must then write up articles for the world’s media.
The book will be available in Cyprus from 8.30 am on Saturday, priced £17.85. The Greek version is due out at the beginning of December.
Christoforos Iraklides, manager of the Hellenic Distribution Agency in Nicosia, the official Cyprus distributors of publishers Bloomsbury, yesterday told the Cyprus Mail that “all copies ordered have already been sold, with more arriving early next week to satisfy demand.”
Akis Christou of the Soloneion Book Centre, in the capital, said the store had ordered 200 copies of the book, with 120 copies already reserved. “It will be pretty chaotic here on Saturday morning, but there should be a really good atmosphere. We have had a special Harry Potter window display up for the past three days, with a countdown clock. I think that the latest book will prove to be even more popular than previous editions as it has been so keenly anticipated for the past two years, ever since Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix was released.”
But the manager of the Moufflon Bookshop in Nicosia thinks enthusiasm for the Harry Potter books is waning. “We started noticing a drop in interest for the Order of the Phoenix and although a lot of people will still buy the Half-Blood Prince, they may not rush out to do so on Saturday. Therefore, we are not planning any special events for the launch of the book here.”
She went on to say that the book, which is only available in hardback to begin with, will be available at Moufflon in both its British and US versions “which differ in size and in the artwork in the dust jacket. Some collectors only want to buy the versions which they already have, in order to create complete sets.”
In 2003, Bloomsbury sold five million copies of the fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, within 24 hours of its release and the latest title is expected to do even better.
“It is going to be the biggest thing ever,” said Jon Howells, a spokesman for Ottakars, one of Britain’s main booksellers. “No other book really compares. People don’t queue up at midnight for any other author, and they don’t just do it in their thousands but in their tens of thousands, in their hundreds of thousands,” he said.
Ottakars has changed its name to “Pottakars” for this week only to mark the launch, and is planning a series of ambitious parties at its stores, with 135 out of 137 of them opening for midnight.
Howells said Rowlings’ series had given an unprecedented boost to the book industry, encouraging more children and adults to read and also opening their eyes to a range of other, lesser-known, but similar writers.
“The whole profile of children’s books has been raised since the Harry Potter thing started going. Publishers spend more money on them, they publish a lot more and they publish them better,” he said.
But with booksellers preparing for record-breaking sales from the latest instalment, a price war has erupted in Britain as companies compete to pull in as many Potter fans as possible.
Supermarkets and online retailers, with their low cost and high volume business model, have been able to undercut high street stores, offering the new book for as little as £8.96. Amazon.com has already taken 1.4 million pre-orders, while the Asda supermarket chain more known for bargain groceries than literature – said demand was huge.
“We are anticipating this to be our biggest-ever selling book,” said company spokesman Dominic Burch.
