‘Half-Blood Prince’ is a full-on smash
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince blasts to the top of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list Thursday, the fifth consecutive No. 1 debut for author J.K. Rowling. First-weekend sales of the book, the sixth in the series, were 23% higher than sales of 2003’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, according to the list. A deluxe edition enters the list at No. 3.
U.S. Publisher Scholastic says 6.9 million copies sold in the first 24 hours and 13.5 million are in print.
The buzz over Half-Blood Prince pushed the series’ first five books back into the list’s top 50 and lifted sales of Harry Potter Schoolbooks and a box set of the first five books into the top 150. But there are indications Potter-mania is reaching saturation. Sales of the Potter back catalog tracked by the list were 41% lower than two years ago, when Phoenix went on sale.
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