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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!

For more details visit the Bloomsbloomsbury web site.

Visit the WCN Harry Potter information pages and message board.