Harry Potter website Pottermore sold $4.8 million (£3 million) worth of e-books in its first month — that works out to around 525,000 copies — and has nearly 7 million unique users, CEO Charlie Redmayne tells The Bookseller. Sales of the Harry Potter print books have increased, too.
Pottermore launched its e-bookstore, the exclusive place to buy Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks, on March 27 and opened the rest of the interactive Harry Potter universe to the public on April 14. Since then, Redmayne says, Pottermore has added 5 million new users, for a total of 7 million unique users in the first two weeks. The average user visits 47 pages and spends 25 minutes on the site.
That’s about 525,000 books
The Harry Potter e-books are priced at $7.99 each (for the first three) or $9.99 each (for the final four books in the series). (Discounted bundles of all seven books are also available.) Assuming an average price of $9.13, that means around 525,739 copies were sold in the first month. Around 164,000 copies were sold in the first three days alone, and Redmayne acknowledged sales had “settled down” but “remain very significant.”
Print sales up, too
The Harry Potter e-books are DRM-free. ”Obviously there were fears piracy would increase as a result of being DRM-free, and that sales of the e-books would cannibalize sales of the physical titles,” Redmayne told The Bookseller, “but we were delighted to see sales of the physical books go up, and piracy come down.” He also said that “though there had been an increase in piracy immediately after launch, the community had rejected these illegal versions because of how the e-books were brought to market.”
I’ll be interviewing Charlie Redmayne at paidContent 2012, May 23 at the TimesCenter in New York. Register here.
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