No doubt about it, this past week has been the week of Harry Potter -- a fireworks-and-champagne phenomenon not seen in the publishing industry for three years. "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," the long-awaited fifth volume in a series, has been flying off the shelves like so many Firebolts since its release June 21. By the end of the first day, the book had smashed sales records in every English-speaking country: Five million copies were snapped up in America, 1.8 million in Britain. But how does one visualize such numbers?
A more telling fact may have surfaced when it was announced that over the first weekend of its U.S. release Harry Potter No. 5 had made more money than "The Hulk." A book outselling a major summer movie: Now that takes magic.
It wasn't just English-speaking countries that were starry-eyed about Harry, either. Although a Japanese translation of Phoenix won't be available for about a year, pre-orders for the English original at Amazon's Japanese Web site were reportedly the largest the company has recorded for any book, Japanese or foreign-language.