Twenty years ago, readers around the world first discovered the magical story of Harry Potter, created by J.K. Rowling. We can now reveal that, since that moment, half a billion Harry Potter books have now been sold. On average, this means one in fifteen people in the world owns a Harry Potter book. The 500 million sales are across the seven books in the series and the three companion volumes, in print and eBook versions.

First published by Bloomsbury in 1997, the books have now been translated into over 80 different languages across the world, with more to come. From Albanian to Azerbaijani to Hebrew to Hawaiian, the stories are becoming accessible to more people all the time.

The seven Harry Potter books contain a total of more than a million words – 1,100,086 to be precise – with some of the invented words, such as ‘Muggle’ and ‘Quidditch’, entering everyday language.