One in 28 Britons snaps up new Harry Potter

The new Harry Potter sold 1.8m copies in Britain on Saturday. The Nielsen BookScan figures mean that one person in every 28 bought The Order of the Phoenix that day. In tiny Orkney, the ratio was one in 16.

The full UK sale was 1,777,541, including internet sales. This compares with 372,775 first day copies for the last Harry Potter, The Goblet of Fire, and 68,159 for the previous one, The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Mainland, the principal Orkney island - population, 10,000 - accounted for 600 copies of the Phoenix. Caroline Hume, at the Orcadian bookshop in the capital, Kirkwall, said: "I kept dashing outside to see if the queue was getting any less. It wasn't. It was like the water buckets in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I was beginning to panic in case we ran out."

The new Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Rev Mike Hill, said Pottermania was making youngsters slaves to consumerism. "It was exploitation of our children that we witnessed at midnight ... Part of our responsibility is to ask questions of our culture and even at times to refuse to collude with aspects of it," he said.