"Pottermania" climaxed Saturday as fans of the schoolboy wizard created by British author JK Rowling finally got their hands on the seventh and final book in the series. In London, the record-breaking launch began at a minute past midnight with Rowling reading passages from the book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to some 500 Potter fans at the Natural History Museum in London.
The book - which went on sale worldwide at 2301 GMT - sees Harry triumph in a final battle over evil, ending speculation that Rowling planned to kill the character off.
But there were also delays and a few publishing slip-ups including an early review by The New York Times that Rowling described as "complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers."
The sales embargo was also broken in Mexico, Finland and Norway by inexperienced bookshop staff, and Pakistani police diffused a car bomb in the port city of Karachi outside a shopping centre that was due to launch the book.
In Israel, the book was sold in spite of protests by ultra- religious Jews concerned that it would break the Sabbath.
WHSmith, which opened its 400 British bookshops at the midnight deadline, sold 15 copies of the book per second, beating the previous record of 13 copies per second for the sixth book in the series.
Fans "stormed the shops" to get their hands on the book, a spokesperson for WHSmith said.
A spokesman for the Waterstone's chain said that the speed of sales for the Harry Potter book was "unprecedented."
"There ain't nothing like that in book-selling history," Jon Howells said.
There were 250,000 fans waiting outside Waterstone's 280 branches at midnight, with 100,000 books being sold in the first two hours.
Some 7,000 people partied at Waterstone's flagship store in central London.
Asda supermarket, which was selling the book at a heavily discounted 5 pounds (10.30 dollars), said they sold half their stock of the book overnight, with 250,000 copies leaving shelves in the first nine hours, the same level of sales for the first 24 hours of the previous novel in the Potter series.
Tesco supermarket said that it would sell 300,000 copies of the book in the first 12 hours of sales.
Publishers Bloomsburg were expected to give prelimiary sales figures for the book on Monday, but it is believed 2.5 million will be sold in the first weekend.
Large crowds gathered in other countries around the world.
"When we switched on the lights, the crowd outside broke into applause," said Simone Thelen of the Mayersche bookstore in the German city of Aachen, on the Dutch border. She said 400 Potter enthusiasts showed up in the middle of the night.
"It was hilarious. Quite a few immediately opened the final page and acted as if they were going to read it aloud to the horrified onlookers and reveal the ending," said Thelen.
Dutch bookstores reported public interest was "enormous." In Rotterdam, some 800 people came to bookstore Donner, one of the larger bookstores in the city centre.
In Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands, some 250 fans were waiting to buy the book.
Czech publishing insiders estimate that at least 10,000 English versions will be snatched up by Czech Potter lovers, a bestseller in this former communist country, where print runs have shrunk significantly since 1989.
Czech readers have so far bought 1.5 million Harry Potter books in the Czech language, says Ondrej Mueller, a programme director at Albatros, a Prague-based publisher of the Czech translations.
Penguin India tied up with Britain's Bloomsbury to distribute 230,000 copies of the book in India. Most of these books are expected to be sold in the first three days.
"There's a sense of community, standing here together. We loved the earlier books, and I just have to know for myself how it ends," said Rahul Sharma, who was waiting outside a Delhi bookstore for five hours with his daughter.
Australian Harry Potter fans were in quiet corners Saturday reading the 607 pages of the series-ending Deathly Hallows book that some had slept out overnight to get their hands on.
"It's better than tranquilizers," said Minerva Mackell, manager of Sydney's Gleebooks chain. "At 9:01 when they got hold of their copies, it was absolute silence."
Gleebooks, which has already sold 2 million Harry Potter books, is expecting first-day sales of Deathly Hallows to break all records. Sales of 350,000 are expected in Australia.
With a record-breaking, first run of 12 million copies, US publisher Scholastic hopes the magic will hold.
In China, staff at a bookshop near Beijing's Workers' Stadium said that more than 100 people rushed into the store when it opened at 6:30 am.
Bookshops in at least four other major Chinese cities - Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chengdu - also began selling the book Saturday.
The China National Publications Import and Export Corporation (CNPIEC) timed the release of the books with the official reopening of its Beijing bookshop, selling the US version for 218 yuan (29 dollars) and the British version for 208 yuan (27 dollars), about 10 times the usual price of a Chinese book.
The Chinese version will retail at 60 yuan (7.90 dollars) when it is released on October 28, the People's Literature Publishing House said.
Pioneer Bookstore in Hanoi opened to huge queues Saturday, but the crowd wasn't there to find the fate of a boy wizard: most of the hundreds of people were waiting to view the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's founding father, whose mausoleum is located next to the state-owned bookstore.
By contrast, the arrival of Harry Potter drew only about 20 people Saturday.
About 10,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows went on sale in 31 locations in Vietnam, but by midday the sales staff at Pioneer Bookstore said only 20 of 160 copies had sold.
Besides being in English, the book was priced at 575,000 dong (35 dollars), or about two weeks' pay for salesclerk Mai Thi Thu.
Sporting a wizard's hat, British Ambassador to Thailand David William Fall presented the first official copy of the book to the first customer in line at an Asia Books outlet at Bangkok's Emporium Shopping Complex, the favoured mall for Thailand's elite shoppers.
More than 10,000 copies of the book, priced at 850 baht (25.40 dollars), were pre-ordered by the fans at the Asia Book store chain.
After a couple of hours of fanfare, the Taipei bookstores called off the book-launch festivities, moving the Harry Potter books to the bestseller section, with most Taiwanese preferring to wait for the Chinese-language version of the book due at the end of the year.
Five million copies of the Harry Potter Chinese edition have been sold in Taiwan.
