Even better, 72 million copies were sold in the first day worldwide.
Remember that the U.S. is not the whole world.
3,699,999. We got ours delivered by Amazon on Monday. 
I suspect lots of people didn’t want to brave the crowds. What surprises me is that Sorcerer’s Stone is still selling. Who in this country doesn’t have copy?
It never did. I guess it just disappeared into the ether. Amazon was fast on the refund, though.
So, for that first 24 hours it was selling at a rate in excess of 833 copies a second.
Stuff it.
I was responding to the OP, who was American, about the copies left in American stores.
Put another way, assuming a U.S. population of 300 million, they printed enough so that 4% of the population each get one. In other words, their initial printing was one copy for every 25 people in the US.
On the first day, they sold copies for almost 3% of the population, leaving more than one copy for every hundred Americans to buy.
Put yet another way, every year 80 to 90 million Americans watch the Super Bowl on its free television broadcast, after being six months of season and playoffs, and media hype much greater than the Harry Potter hype. On the first day of sales, 10% of the number of people who would sit on their asses in front of the TV to watch a three hour football game went to a bookstore (real or online) and plunked down $20 or more to buy a book that will remain on sale for the foreseeable remainder of eternity.
Put still another way, holy shit!
This wasn’t the Playstation 3. They anticipated demand and planned accordingly.
I and the 8 friends and family members that read the books all pre-ordered the books.
I don’t! Some time ago, I read The Philosopher’s Stone & liked it. (Yes, I ordered the British edition from a Canadian bookseller.)
Got bogged down in #2. But will probably pick it up again & eventually work my way through the series.
Same here; I was at a Super Target on Saturday at about 2PM, getting some bottled water and laundry detergent, and I grabbed a copy from a display (of at least 100 copies) at the checkout stand. It was literally an afterthought.
The difference between Harry Potter books and, say, Cabbage Patch Kids or Playstation 3s or concert tickets or iPhones is that Harry Potter fans don’t need to worry that there won’t be enough books for everyone. Hence, there are parties and some minor “camping out,” but no real madness.
I can’t remember which one it was, but somewhere earlier in the series some stores greatly underestimated the number of copies they were going to need in the first weeks of publication–and they ran out. Our local Barnes and Noble was one of them and they were given a lot of grief about it by customers and lost a lot of business. So no one was about to come close to letting that happen again.
When you think about it like that… Scruffy Merlin’s Beard!
I wonder how many copies sold here in China. The list price at the local foreign bookstore is 285 RMB ($35 or so), which is equivalent to some people’s monthly salaries. Of course there’s quite a substantial wealthy community, as well, but I’m betting that most of the middle class will wait for pirated (Chinese or English) versions. I borrowed a pretty convincing fake of book 6, until I noticed characters like Valdemort, Ronlad and Hermone popping up at random places, and never being heard from again. (I give them credit for at least using a spell-checker first, which they seem to neglect with most pirated things here:))
Yes. I’ve always thought the bookstore frenzy was weird. I’ve bought the last 3 books at Target on the Saturday morning they were released with no fuss, while right down at the other end of the mall, there was a line in front of Borders to get it. People buy into the hype, I guess.
They do, especially when they’re 10 years old. My eldest son wanted to go to the midnight release party at our local bookstore in the worst way. So we went. He dressed up as Harry, saw a bunch of his friends there, did some of the activities on offer, and was eagerly near the head of the line when the boxes were brought forth from the storeroom and opened at the stroke of 12:01am. We had fun but slept late the next day. We’ve been reading the book aloud every night since then, and are now about 200 pages in.
The pre-sales are partly hype, but mostly a way for the bookstores to get an idea of how many people are going to want the book right away.
At the B&N I work at, we got about 2,200 copies in on Wednesday. At the midnight party we sold about 450, and then roughly another 500 over the course of regular Saturday hours. Sunday, we sold about 100, and around 40-50 every day since.
So yeah, we’ve got plenty left. 
I took the kids to the pre-release party at Borders, but since I didn’t pre-order the book I was told I wouldn’t be able to get in line to buy it until about 2am.
I was tired and cranky and we left about 12:30am. Along the way we passed a 24-hour Wal-Mart, ran in, and bought the book for about half the price Borders was going to charge me.
No line, either.
Hehe…I totally misread this. I was going to say, “Wow, they were down to their last three (copies)?” I had an image of you hawking these rare copies on eBay or something.
I didn’t have the first books for a long time. I didn’t pick up the series until the 3rd or 4th book was already out, and I had 2 sisters who both already owned the books so I didn’t bother buying them myself for a long time. I just bought book 6 a few weeks ago (although I had already read it.) I didn’t read book 6 until a few months after it came out, so this was the first time I really eagerly anticipated a new release and had to wait like other people. In retrospect I am glad I didn’t have this wait every time!
I would guess that a lot of other people had the same experience, they were slow to get into the series or just are deciding that they want their own set instead of borrowing someone else’s.
I ordered mine from Amazon too, and was a little worried when it was late afternoon on Sat. and I didn’t have it yet. It finally showed up in the mailbox around 4:30. I wonder what their delivery failure rate was.
I actually bought 2 copies of HP7 so my husband and I could finish the series at the same time without spoiling anything. I gave away the second copy on Freecycle.com yesterday. 20 people responded to my post in the first half hour.