Latest Harry Potter instalment breaks Amazon records

by Juliette Garside,, Brand Republic 19-Jun-03, 15:00

LONDON - 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix', the latest instalment in the Potter publishing phenomenon, has generated more than 350,000 advance orders for Amazon.co.uk.

The online retailer is on course to deliver all the books by Saturday June 21, the date on which JK Rowling's fifth book about the young magician appears.

This year's pre-order list is five times as big as for the release of the last Potter book, 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', which generated 65,000 pre-orders for Amazon.co.uk.

Requests have come in from at home and abroad, from the Outer Hebrides in Scotland to St Ives in Cornwall, and from more than 150 countries including Barbados, Nepal, Fiji and Tanzania.

Worldwide, Amazon has registered more than 1m advance orders for 'Order of the Phoenix', twice those for the Goblet of Fire.

In order to cope with what it claims is the largest distribution in e-commerce history, Amazon UK has taken on extra staff who are packaging and shipping the books under tight security at a dedicated warehouse at its distribution centre in Milton Keynes.

Some nine trailers of cardboard boxes and 36 miles of shipping labels will be used to package the tomes for delivery.

The web will play another significant part in the launch of 'Order of the Phoenix' on June 26, when Rowling reads an extract from it at the Royal Albert Hall. For those who can not attend in person, the event will be broadcast on the internet.

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