Half-Blood Prince expected to fly off the shelves
Pre-orders for JK Rowling's latest book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince look likely to top 1 million as it debuts on store shelves and bookseller's sites this weekend. Available worldwide from 12.01 am on Saturday, the sixth book in the series is poised to break web site traffic records and is expected to tempt thousands of fans to about 1,400 stores open until the early hours of the morning.

Amazon.co.uk has so far clocked up 350,000 pre-orders, still short of the 420,000 it received for the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Amazon's numbers are also topped by WHSmith, which claims it has received 500,000 orders. The retailer also said that the proportion of pre-orders with the adult cover was also up from 10 per cent for Phoenix to 30 per cent for the latest book. Asda declined to say how many pre-orders of the book it had received so far, but did reveal that pre-orders reached 1,500 a day this week.

Tesco had no pre-order data, but said that it expected to sell 300 copies a minute when doors open later tonight.

Retailers across the country expect to sell about 2 million copies in the first 24 hours of its availability

Tesco book buyer Caroline Ridding said: 'The sixth Harry Potter has become the most eagerly anticipated book in literary history and has already broken our pre-release sales [expectations]. We are expecting it to continue to smash all our sales records as it becomes the biggest and fastest-selling book we have ever stocked.'

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