Play text overtakes Fifty Shades of Grey to become fastest-selling book this decade, and looks set to be bestselling script of all time

JK Rowling has proved that she still has the magic touch after the script of her dramatised story, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, sold more than 680,000 print copies in the UK in just three days - making it the fastest-selling book since the last Harry Potter title.

Publisher Little, Brown, which released the script of the eighth Harry Potter story at one minute past midnight on Sunday 31 July, announced the sales on Wednesday morning. Little, Brown said they made the Cursed Child play the fastest-selling playscript ever, and the fastest-selling book published this decade.

According to the Bookseller magazine, the sales of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have already beaten the biggest single-week sale of any title this decade. The record was previously held by EL James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which sold 664,478 copies in a week in 2012.

The magazine predicted that if the playscript continues to sell at this rate, it will become the title with the second biggest single-week sales, behind Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which sold 1.8m copies of the children’s edition, and 780,000 copies of the adult edition in July 2007.

“After just two days’ sales, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is already our biggest-selling hardback since Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol in 2009,” said Waterstones buying director Kate Skipper. “By the end of this first week, we expect to exceed The Lost Symbol sales and to match the lifetime sales of our bestselling script book ever, An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley. There’s no doubt about it; this will be our biggest book of the year.”

In the US, publisher Scholastic announced that more than 2m copies of the Cursed Child were sold in the first 48 hours, from an initial US print run of 4.5m copies. Scholastic called the sales figures “unprecedented for a script book.”

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The play, by Jack Thorne, is based on an original story by Rowling, Thorne and John Tiffany. Telling the story of an adult Harry Potter, now the father of three children and an employee of the ministry of magic, performances began in June with its official premiere in London on 30 July. It follows Rowling’s seven novels about the wizard as a child, which were published between 1997 and 2007 and have sold more than 450m copies worldwide.