New Harry Potter book sells 3.3 million copies in 10 days in North America

It’s been almost 20 years since he made his debut, but it turns out J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter still has that magic touch.

The new book, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” sold more than 3.3 million copies in the U.S. and Canada, publisher Scholastic announced Wednesday. More than half of those sales, 2 million books, took place in the first two days of its release.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two” is markedly different from the seven books that preceded it. It’s not a novel, but rather the script to a play that’s currently being performed in London’s West End.

It’s the only “Harry Potter” story so far that wasn’t written solely by Rowling. The script was written by Jack Thorne, based on a story he wrote with Rowling and John Tiffany.

That hasn’t stopped fans from snapping up copies of the book, though.

It’s currently ranked No. 1 among all books on Amazon’s American, Canadian and British sites.

In a news release, Scholastic Trade president Ellie Berger hinted that the company had seen increased sales of the previous “Harry Potter” books as well.

“We are delighted to see the sustained enthusiasm for ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two’ which has also sparked more interest in the seven previously published Harry Potter books,” Berger said. More than 160 million copies of the Harry Potter series have been sold in the U.S., and more than 450 million have been sold worldwide.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” takes place 19 years after the events of the seventh book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The play follows Harry as an adult with three children, and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, now a married couple.

The popularity of the play hasn’t been confined to the printed version.Tickets to the original run sold out almost instantly, and a batch of 250,000 tickets for the second half of 2017 were snapped up within hours.

Producers of the five-hour play haven’t committed to any performances outside London, but they have hinted at the possibility of Harry and his friends coming to America.

Sonia Friedman, one of the producers, told the New York Times that they’re starting to think about the play’s future. “Of course, it would be disingenuous to think New York and Broadway weren’t part of our thinking,” she said.