Wii outsells PS3 in Japan

Nintendo’s Wii console outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 in Japan last month by six to one, says research. Nintendo sold 270,974 Wii consoles last month while Sony sold 41,628 PS3s, according to Enterbrain, a Japanese publisher that tracks console sales.

Nintendo has sold about 2.76m Wii consoles in Japan since the launch last December, while Sony has sold 970,270 PS3s since it debuted last November.

Globally, Sony has struggled so far to replicate the success it had with the first two PlayStation consoles.

Harry Potter Book 7 sets online pre-sale record

The seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has become online retailer Amazon’s most pre-ordered product, with almost 1.6 million copies bought globally ahead of the book’s release on July 21.

Amazon said on Monday that demand for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” passed the previous record of 1.5 million copies ordered online before the release of the previous book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”.

The retailer predicted that the number of orders for the seventh book would rise by “many more hundreds of thousands of copies.”

Harry Potter is published by Bloomsbury in Britain and distributed in the United States by Scholastic Corp.