Prince Harry suffers fresh blow as Duke of Sussex sets unwanted record
Prince Harry’s memoir Spare has become the most traded-in biography for the second consecutive year, according to second-hand book website We Buy Books.
The website revealed it purchased 567 copies of the Duke of Sussex’s autobiography in 2024.
A spokesman for We Buy Books confirmed: “For the second year running, Prince Harry’s Spare is the most traded in biography of 2024. This year, we purchased a total of 567 copies.”
This follows last year’s trend when 459 customers traded in their hardback copies.
Despite originally retailing at £28, the memoir’s value has plummeted in the second-hand market.
We Buy Books now offers just £3.38 for hardback copies, while paperback versions fetch a mere 50p.
The book can still be found at its original price of £28 at Waterstones, where the paperback version is discounted to £8.99.
On Amazon, the hardback edition is currently available for £14.
We Buy Books, which provides instant valuations using ISBN numbers, has purchased more than five million books in 2024.
The memoir’s current trade-in rates stand in stark contrast to its record-breaking initial success.
Upon its January 2023 release, Spare achieved the largest first-day sales total for any non-fiction book ever published by Penguin Random House.
The book sold more than 1.4 million copies across the US, Canada and Britain on its first day alone.
It surpassed Barack Obama’s 2020 autobiography, “A Promised Land,” to become the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time.
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The memoir’s success was partly driven by major retailers, including Waterstones, WHSmith and Amazon, offering it at half price.
In the UK market, “Spare” achieved remarkable initial sales figures.
The memoir sold 467,183 print copies in its first week of release. Including all formats, UK sales reached 750,000 copies during the opening week.
This performance established “Spare” as the fastest-selling non-fiction book in the UK since Nielsen BookData began recording official printed book sales in 1998.
The memoir significantly outperformed previous records, including Kay Allinson’s “Pinch of Nom” cookbook, which sold 210,506 copies in its first three days in 2019.