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| July 20, 2007 | Friday | Rajab 04, 1428 |
KARACHI: Simply wizard!
KARACHI: July 21st, the day that the last book in the Harry Potter series is to be released, is ticking closer and the hype is reaching fever pitch. In London, people are queuing outside bookstores and across the Atlantic, Scholastic – the American publishers of JK Rowling’s series – has already sued two companies for breaking the embargo and dispatching copies of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.
Pakistan is not far behind.
Liberty Books, the sole distributor of the Bloomsbury-published book, is launching The Deathly Hallows at 4am to coincide with the GMT midnight worldwide release. It’s going to be a wizard function, quipped Liberty Books’ brand manager, Sharmeen Hussain. The Park Towers venue will “be transformed into a magical environment. Plasma screens will show scenes from the Harry Potter films and original posters will be available.” Ms Hussain encouraged the 2,000 plus invitees to attend, tantalisingly promising that “the launch will be more interesting than it sounds” while refusing to give details that may spoil the surprise.
Why, after all, should Harry’s swansong not be given such tremendous applause? In a country where far too few people take joy in the printed word, particularly in English, discounted pre-booking facilities for the seventh Harry Potter book drew 3,000 orders from Karachi alone, with 75 orders placed with Liberty Books through the internet. This figure does not include the orders placed with dozens of other stockists across the country. Ahmed Saeed, the owner of Islamabad’s Saeed Book Bank, for example, reported that his store received 1,700 pre-bookings and expects cash-counter sales to range between three to five thousand books.
While Liberty Books kept to itself the estimated countrywide sales of The Deathly Hallows, Ms Hussain admitted that “they are likely to be high. The response to this book has been tremendous, particularly for Pakistan where not so many young people are interested in reading.”
All stockists are in agreement that Pakistani Muggles truly discovered magic around the time Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the fifth and sixth books, were published in 2003 and 2004 respectively. “These sold about 10,000 copies each countrywide,” Ms Hussain told Dawn. Saeed Book Bank alone sold about 3,000 copies of the sixth book.
Even as stockists make sure their cash tills are in working order, however, the ugly spectre of piracy looms in the background. Pirated copies of earlier Harry Potter books became available within days of the publication dates and were sold at a fraction of the price set by the publishers. According to Ms Hussain of Liberty Books, the company is “very worried” since past experience has shown that piracy takes away half the market. This cheats not only the stockists but also the author and publisher out of much-deserved royalties. “This is why we’ve made such an effort to make the book available in Pakistan on time,” she said, adding that for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Bloomsbury has set up an agency to check piracy in Pakistan. “Prominent notices have been put up in Urdu Bazaar and other places warning would-be pirates that strict legal action will be taken against them,” she informed Dawn. “The publishers have already made an effort to offer the book for lower prices in Pakistan and India, where the purchasing power is lower. People must make the effort of refusing to buy pirated copies.”
Sadly enough, though, Mr Saeed of Islamabad’s Saeed Book Bank reports that small book stores have already put up banners advertising The Deathly Hallows at Rs195 to Rs295 “As a result, we had to reduce our original order of 10,000 copies of the book to 5,000 copies,” he said. “Pirated books take away about 75 per cent of our market. The book’s sale price is 19 pounds, which is over Rs2,000 in Pakistani rupees. But we are selling it for Rs1,595 over the counter, and pre-bookings were discounted to Rs1,350. Customers should refuse to buy pirated books.”
The financial concerns of the publishing and book retailing industries are important, yet what Muggle fans want most at this stage is simply to find out how it all turns out. Author Rowling has revealed that two characters are to die in the final book — will Harry Potter live or die? He’s already been immortalised in readers’ imaginations.
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