Prince Harry has been in the headlines for days because parts of his autobiography were published prematurely – and with them spicy content about the British royal family, drugs, first sex, family violence and also about his experiences as a gunman in the Afghan war.

Fueled by this public attention, the book has been available in bookstores worldwide since Tuesday.

In Great Britain, the book with the original title "Spare" was launched at midnight, and some bookshops were even open at night.

According to the publisher Penguin Random House, which belongs to the German media group Bertelsmann, the book will be published in 15 other languages ​​in addition to English, including German, Spanish, French, Italian and simplified Chinese.

In Germany, the book is marketed under the title "Reserve".

For the first German edition, 200,000 copies were printed, a high value for a first edition.

The publisher is just going to press the second edition, the paper has already been ordered, further editions are to follow - one is quite sure of success.

"I can imagine that it will be the book of the year," said a spokeswoman for Penguin Verlag of the FAZ. She expects that the book will "very quickly climb to number one on the bestseller list" and will stay there for a long time.

The book is already at the top of the bestseller lists on Amazon.

The publisher's spokeswoman believes that the target group is quite large: "You can read the book as a 20-year-old man as well as a 60-year-old woman."

The book was originally supposed to be on bookstore shelves by Christmas, but it had to be revised again after Queen Elizabeth's death in September.

Prince Harry wrote the 500-page book with the help of ghostwriter JR Moehringer.

The publisher is said to have paid several million dollars for the publication of Harry's memoirs.

The book launch was accompanied by two major television interviews.

In Harry's adopted homeland of America, a journalist from the broadcaster CBS interviewed him on the program "60 Minutes".

In the UK, an interview was broadcast on ITV on Sunday, while in Germany, RTL broadcast the interview in German translation the night before the book was published.

Like the world's largest book publishing group, Penguin Random House, the station belongs to the Bertelsmann media group.

Penguin Random House has had great success with biographical books by celebrities in the past, and in the process created media publicity through cooperation within its own group.

In November 2020, the publisher launched Barack Obama's memoir (“A Promised Land”).

Two years earlier, his wife Michelle's ("Becoming") memoir had become a bestseller.

This book has sold more than 17 million copies.

Michelle Obama's second book ("The Light Within") was published in November 2022 and quickly made it to the top of the non-fiction lists again.

The book industry generates annual sales of almost ten billion euros in Germany.

Around 70,000 titles appear on the German book market every year, almost 9,000 of which are books from other languages ​​that have been translated into German, two thirds of them from English.

The best-selling non-fiction book in Germany last year was the book "You mustn't believe everything you think" by comedian Kurt Krömer.