Muggle cashiers sell Harry Potter books to fans inside a Waterstone's bookshop in the Kensington neighborhood of London. (Photo: Steven Ehrenberg)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is flying off bookshelves. Nearly 7 million copies were sold in the United States and another 2 million in England—just on the first day! That is a record for the most books sold in a single day. The old record was held by the previous book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

J. K. Rowling's story about a boy wizard and his friends has seized the imagination of millions of kids and adults around the world. The books have been translated into 62 languages, from Albanian to Zulu, and sold more than 250 million copies.

Early Readers

Rachel Grandi, a 20-year-old student living in New York City, bought one of the first books sold in the United States. She had lined up at a Barnes & Noble at 7:45 a.m. on Friday morning and received her copy at a minute after midnight on Saturday.

"She's such an amazing author," Rachel said of J. K. Rowling.

Hours earlier, at the Waterstone's bookstore in Kensington, England, a line of kids wrapped around the corner of Jubilee Place to buy the book. Clerks dressed as witches kept the queue (pronounced like the letter Q—it's what the British call a line) in order. "If anybody tries to storm the doors, I'll turn them into a baboon," warned one witch.

The kids mused darkly about the plot of the new book. "Someone's going to die," guessed Jimmy, an 11-year-old from Texas in the Waterstone's queue. Then he brightened. "And Harry's going to have a love interest!"

Charlotte, 8, agreed with his prediction. "I think one of the characters dies, and I think it's going to be Dumbledore," she said, referring to the wise old headmaster of Hogwarts, Harry's beloved school.

All of the Harry Potter fans who spoke with Scholastic News Online expected the book to conclude with the death of a main character. Rowling herself admitted that she was "seriously upset" after writing the end of this book. Henry, a 12-year-old online at Waterstone's, theorized about the seventh and final book in the series, which Rowling has not yet written.

"I think good is going to win," said Henry. "But it's going to suffer many losses first."

Rowling won't give away any secrets. "It would be great to sit here and talk about book seven," she said in an interview on Monday. "But I think you would rather read it, wouldn't you?"