Harry Potter Takes China - Spoilers Aside
Chinese book stores opened their doors at 7:01 am, Bejing time, together with the world.
Thousands of fans swarmed into book stores to buy up 200 books in the first 40 minutes and 2,301 volumes by 6:00 pm…700 more than the first day sales of the sixth installment.
The first buyer arrived at the book store 11 hours prior to opening!
One die-hard fan, (not a Bruce Willis fan) skipped through the 607-page book to the end to see if the ending was the same as the version she saw leaked on
a foreign website a week earlier.
Somebody posted 10 spoilers at my sister site, TheBizOfKnowledge.
And they were all true!
Chinese students must wait for a translation or struggle through the Deathly Hallows in English.
Official translations will take another 3 months - around late October
Many are happy to do so to improve their English. BTW, how would someone say Muggle in Chinese?
Altogether - Beijing got 38,000 Harry Potter Books and Shanghai got 20,000 from English publishers.
10 million volumes of the previous six book have been sold in China compared to 22.5 million in Britain and 27.5 million in the United States.
Seems as if Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling's magic knows no cultural boundaries.
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