A great man once told me, that if you want to know how you will shape up in the next 5 years, then look at the people you have lunch with and the books you read. If have been very picky of the books that I read and the friends that I keep since then. My time in AIESEC, has exposed to a lot of different people, and in the recent past I have been spending a large part of my time reading.
Harry Potter is my undoubtley one of my favourites. I am one of the biggest Harry Potter fans that exists. I have just got my hands on the latest edition of the Half Blood Prince and can't wait to get back to it.
Going through some billion web-sites of Harry Potter (out of the zillions that exist), I happened to find few interesting facts. I am sure you would have come across a lot of these in the recent past. The more I think about them, the more I realize how BIG this is.
- The first five Harry Potters have now sold more than 265 million copies in 200 countries worldwide and been translated into 62 languages.
- Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, sold 1.8 million copies in the UK within 24 hours of publication - a rate of 21 books per second. In fact, if all those books were stacked up the pile would be 12 times higher than Mount Everest.
- Indeed, the global popularity of the books, films, games and merchandising has, according to Forbes magazine, made the Harry Potter brand worth an estimated £0.56bn - nearly three times the size of Brand Beckham, reportedly worth £213 million. And it's not just in the UK where Harry Potter is important to the economy. In the United States, Forbes (again) commented: "At least a dozen companies list Harry Potter as a factor that either boosted or slowed their sales last year."
- JK ROWLING has been the best-selling fiction author (in adult and children's fiction) since 1998.
- Books, films and merchandising have made her the world's richest author and the richest woman in Britain, with an estimated fortune of more than £500 million.
- If all the Harry Potter books ever sold were placed end to end, they would go around the world 1.4 times.
- Bloomsbury paid JK Rowling a modest £2000 as an advance, and the book first appeared in children's bookshops in
- JK Rowling's official website, launched in 2004, had 17.5 million hits in its first week, all through word of mouth, with no publicity around its launch. Within eight weeks, it received 220 million visits.
- In the US, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the fastest selling book in history, selling more than five million copies in the first 24 hours. In total, close to 80 million copies of Harry Potter were sold there.
Don't wait for the movies. If you haven't hooked onto the craze yet, then I really don't know what are you waiting for? History is being made here! Get up, buy your copy today!
