News

The publishing event of the year could be even bigger than anticipated: Amazon's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pre-order 'muggle counter' has topped 2m.

The numbers make it the biggest-selling single item ordered online for delivery on one day.

The sheer size of pre-orders is rivalled by Royal Mail's mammoth delivery operation, which has been six months in the making.

It involves 180 extra trucks and an extra train service to carry the expected 600,000 copies from retailer warehouses to 1,400 Royal Mail delivery offices.

Pre-order figures for the final in the series amount to around one copy for every 43 households in the UK.

Supermarkets are also predicting strong sales, with Tesco expecting to sell 350,000 copies on the Saturday 21 July launch day.

In the US, freight operations are of an equally large scale, with residents of Crawfordsville in Indiana reporting high levels of rail activity at night.

The town's biggest employer is print giant RR Donnelley. Locals reported trains with six or seven trucks running out of plant every quarter of an hour.

The title is being printed by Clays in the UK.