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Bookstores, licensees readying for 'Harry Potter' rollout


Merchandisers expect the Potter name to generate hundreds of millions in revenues

From Bill Tucker
CNNfn Correspondent

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Bookstores are scrambling to make sure they're well-stocked and ready to capitalize on the latest "Harry Potter" installment when it lands on bookshelves at midnight.

Nearly 4 million copies of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" will be released at midnight, a publishing milestone.

"This is the biggest printing that we know of, children's or adult publishing. It's unprecedented," said Jennifer Brown of Publishers Weekly.

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Customers have been reserving copies of the books for weeks.

"We already have hundreds of orders in place waiting for the owners to come and retrieve them," said Frances Kelly of Barnes & Noble.

Independent bookstores are hoping to outdo the chains, some of them opening past midnight Friday, dressing staff members in costumes and handing out Potter-related paraphernalia.

Peter Glassman, owner of Books of Wonder in Manhattan, says "Harry Potter" has been positively magical for his bottom line.

"It's probably about 2 or 3 percent of our total sales, which is significant," he said. "No one book usually achieves that, or one group."

Online bookseller Amazon.com, which already has received hundreds of thousands of orders, is offering the book at a 40 percent discount and has promised reduced-rate overnight delivery to the first 250,000 customers.

Don't expect to see "Harry Potter" hysteria calm down anytime soon. Warner Brothers has a "Harry Potter" movie coming around Thanksgiving next year, and it has signed 46 licensing deals for games, puzzles and action figures, among other things. Warner Brothers is a subsidiary of Time Warner, which owns CNN Interactive.

All told, Warner Brothers is expected to rake in more than a billion dollars from licensed merchandise.


Warner Brothers has signed 46 licensing deals for toys, puzzles and other Potter paraphernalia

The first products are expected to reach Warner Brothers stores in October, and toy companies already are having trouble churning out enough to meet store demand. That's not surprising, given analysts' predictions that "Harry Potter" will be one of the most lucrative licenses ever.

"If you compared 'Harry Potter' to 'Star Wars,' you're probably in the same vicinity of expected revenue, you know, in the billion-dollar-plus range," said Sean McGowan of Gerard Klauer Mattison. "And similar to 'Star Wars,' this is something that has been around for some time now and will be around for a long time in the future."