Sex sells, but so does land rezoning. The demand for Mr Justice Flood's latest work has amazed his printers and the staff in the Government Publications Office.
At 9 a.m. yesterday queues had formed outside the office in Dublin for the second instalment in the Flood trilogy.
"We are literally selling warm copies," said Mr David Wall. "Every batch that comes in is going out as fast. It's a case of first come, first served. The queues are going out the door and down the street. I've never seen anything like it."
Yesterday evening the Office of Public Works, which is overseeing the printing, estimated that at least 2,000 copies had been sold. A further 8,000 are being printed, and the Government Publications Office will open today at 9 a.m. in an attempt to satisfy the public demand. About 400 copies, hot off the printers, will be on sale.
Hundreds of orders have also been taken by the office's mail order service. Many of these are coming from book shops, which have also been inundated with demands for the report.
These have not received any copies yet, but the second interim report should be available around the State from Monday.
"It could definitely be classified as a fast-moving best-seller," said Mr Alan Johnston, book-marketing manager with Easons. "That is, if we had copies to sell," he added.
Booksellers compare everything to Roy Keane's biography now, he said, and while that had sold more than 50,000 copies in its first week, the performance of Mr Justice Flood's work was still impressive.
It was difficult to compare it with a regular book, he said, as it cost only €1 and there was such an instant demand for its content.
Books by authors such as Maeve Binchy were "slow burners" which built up sale through word-of-mouth. The tribunal report, on the other hand, was a fast bestseller and sales would probably collapse once the content had become widely known. However, its first day of sale compared very favourably with the performance of authors such as Ms Binchy, he said.
When copies ran out at various stages in the Government Publications Office yesterday, people bought the compact disc version instead, said Mr Wall. "They prefer to get it on paper but we got about 200 CDs and they are all sold out, too."
At one stage, the telephone system crashed, such was the demand from callers.
"It's just extraordinary," said Ms Linda Hanley, an OPW spokeswoman. "The reasons are the content and the price. If the content wasn't interesting, the price would make no difference".
Five years of tribunal investigation and 35,000 pages of transcripts have been distilled into a 402-page report. "Many people were buying two or three copies because it is so cheap," Mr Wall said.
What were people saying about the report? "Oh, we had no time to talk to them," he said. "It was too busy."
About 20,000 people visited the Flood tribunal website www.flood-tribunal.ie yesterday, where the report can be downloaded. It is also available from the Irish Times website www.ireland.com
The OPW has said it will continue to print copies of the report as long as there is a demand for it.
