iPhone stories back in the lead over Harry Potter

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We begin the fourth week of iPhone availability with the iPhone Buzz index at 18,208. That value outranks Harry Potter stories this morning by more than 1700 stories. The biggest iPhone story this morning is the iPhone's Safari security vulnerability found by Independent Security Evaluators as reported in the New York Times. As is typical with these zero-day vulnerabilities though, not enough details have been revealed yet to make a proper assessment of its significance.

As I looked at the reports of strong Harry Potter sales over the weekend, I wondered if they might challenge the iPhone's first weekend launch in terms of dollar value. Today I found out data that suggests (but doesn't prove) that it didn't. Initial data says that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 8.3 million copies in the first 24 hours. The entire first print run of 12 million books would have to sell out during the weekend at an average selling price of $23 a copy to equal the iPhone launch dollar value we estimated at $275 million. It does not appear that the entire print run sold out and while we don't know what the average selling price turned out to be, we don't think it exceeded $23 because of widespread discounting to attract customers. Still, it's not bad when sales of a book during the first weekend even approaches the value of the biggest consumer electronics launches in history.


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Meanwhile, iPhone availability remains excellent. A couple of Apple stores sold out over the weekend (including the North Shore store here in MA, but not Burlington where I was), but 164 stores still have them in stock.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Store, Harry Potter, iPhone, iPhone availability, iPhone Buzz Index, iPhone Maps, Security