I'm still sort of in a Harry Potter mode (NON-spoiler)
EDITOR'S NOTE: OODLES OF DWEEBING COMING UP IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. (I'M NOT JUST BEING A TEASE; I'VE ACTUALLY GOT A BUNCH OF DWEEBING ALREADY TO POST).
BUT FOR THE PURPOSES OF WEEKEND POSTING....OUR MOTTO, LESS THINKING, MORE PICTURES....HERE'S SOME MORE SEMI-RANDOM HARRY POTTER'ING.
HERE’S THE HP STUFF THAT ISN’T SPOILER’IFIC OR REVIEWS OF HP6.
JUST SOME ODDS-N-ENDS, HARRY POTTER-STYLE.
Pirates quick to scan new Potter book online
LONDON -- The sixth book in the Harry Potter series, the fastest-selling book of all time, has become among the quickest to fall prey to Internet piracy, with illicit copies available online within hours of its release. Tech-savvy fans of the boy wizard teamed up to scan the entire 600-plus-page book into digital form, with unauthorized e-book copies appearing online less than 12 hours after "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" went on sale on Saturday. Copies of the audio version of the book were also widespread on file-trading networks such as BitTorrent. The full text was available for free on the Internet as an unauthorized e-book in China, the Beijing News reported on Wednesday. A lawyer for author J.K. Rowling's agents, Christopher Little, said his firm was working to combat the piracy but admitted that some illicit copies would probably slip through EDITOR’S NOTE: ON THE PLUS SIDE, KIDS ARE READING!
BUT WAIT….THERE’S MORE DEATH-EATER ACTIVITY…..
Pirates of the Potter-ian
By Robert Andrews
02:00 AM Jul. 21, 2005 PT
Author J.K. Rowling has been branded a "Luddite fool" for inadvertently encouraging fans to pirate the latest Harry Potter book only hours after its official release.EDITOR’S NOTE: SO IT’S HER FAULT THAT PEOPLE ARE IMPATIENT AND GREEDY AND IMMORAL?
The sixth installment in the popular series was published worldwide Friday and is expected to further enhance what has become a multibillion-dollar publishing phenomenon.
But within hours, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been scanned and put online by an underground collection of fans capitalizing on Rowling's decision not to release an official e-book version.
Rowling's publisher had hoped to maintain a strict embargo until midnight Friday. But by then, hundreds were already reading the book thanks to Potter fans who organized over Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, to scan and distribute the book.
Potter fans coordinated a worldwide effort to turn the book's 672 pages into a home-brew digital copy -- now available on file-sharing networks and by using BitTorrent.
"I'd love to see the expression on Rowling's face when she finds out that this book got ripped within, what, 11 hours of the release?" one of those involved in the operation told cohorts in the main public IRC chat room, #pottermania.
Although Potter has become a multimedia cash cow, with 52 million books sold and products ranging from figurines to a $2.35 billion movie series, Rowling has so far decided against publishing the stories in e-book format, a medium growing by up to 40 percent annually, according to the New York-based Open eBook Forum, a trade body.
"The store where I work had the shipment by Wednesday, but they weren't legally allowed to sell them until Friday night," another of the scanners said in a chat room. "I didn't read it because I'm still reading book one, EDITOR’S NOTE: AND BOY ARE YOUR LIPS TIRED? but I did scan it like crazy so people could get a head start on it. We only got up to chapter seven; I stopped when you could legally buy it."
After fellow fantasy fans contributed the missing scans and chipped in to run optical-character-recognition software on the pages, a Russian website used by the team to host the ripped book received 80,000 hits, according to the individual.
Unauthorized versions of the book are available in Word, PDF and plain-text formats suitable for handhelds and other devices, alongside an audio recording thought to be the as-yet-unreleased official narration.
The runaway success of the Potter series has seen British author Rowling amass a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. Her latest installment shifted 2 million copies in the United Kingdom alone on its first day, breaking a record. But Rowling's camp has declined to publish Potter in electronic format, citing security concerns.
"You should never trust any Harry Potter e-books offered for download from the internet or on P2P/file-trading networks," wrote Rowling on her website in January while warning fans of a virus masquerading as a Potter e-book.
David Rothman, a Virginia-based e-book advocate and author who runs the TeleRead digital libraries project, said Rowling was a "Luddite fool" and called her stance "very shortsighted."
"Either she is ignoring the facts or doesn't want to take a little time to understand the technology and allow for her prejudices," he said. EDITOR’S NOTE: AND I’M SURE CALLING HER NAMES IS GOING TO HELP YOUR CASE.
The Half-Blood Prince is not the first time readers have created their own digital copies of books, Rothman added, blaming the practice on a muddled e-book market with multiple, incompatible formats and a paucity of big-name offerings.
"The industry has done so badly because of all those clashing formats, over-restrictive digital rights management (or DRM) and the omission of some of the most popular titles," he said.
"The best DRM is reasonable prices," he added. "At $10 or $5 for a legit copy, piracy wouldn't be as tempting. (But publishers) won't even spend a few extra bucks to see what digital magic Potter can do for their bottom lines."
Rowling's agent said action would be taken against sites hosting copies of the book to defend the author's rights and shield children from offensive material.
"We want to prevent piracy for many reasons, financial being the very last one of those," said Neil Blair, a lawyer and partner at the Christopher Little Literary Agency. "We have not yet taken the decision to license e-book rights -- a position shared by most, if not all, children's book authors. My guess is that official e-books suffer piracy, too, so maybe just by offering an official product you won't completely remove the piracy.
"Well over 10 million people (bought the book) on July 16 alone; people still like reading books on paper. Whilst I do not want to belittle the piracy, proportionally compared to traditional sales, it is tiny."
Open eBook Forum executive director Nick Bogaty acknowledged the e-book market is "miniscule" and limited to enthusiasts. But he said several big draws -- like Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code -- were now on board. He urged Rowling's publishers to offer book downloads through trusted channels like Amazon.com or Jkrowling.com.
But when the next installment in the Potter saga -- the seventh and last in the series -- arrives, the scanners will be ready.
"For the next book, we're going to be prepared," said the Half-Blood Prince scanner. "The people who'll be helping me will be at their computers waiting for me to get home with it and I'll be calling in sick to work for a day or two so I can scan it without interruptions." EDITOR’S NOTE: I LOVE TO HEAR ABOUT CRIMINALS PLANNING THEIR ILLICIT ACTIVITIES WELL IN ADVANCE. MAYBE THE ENFORCEMENT FOLKS CAN SCHEDULE ARRESTS ACCORDINGLY?
Harry Potter and the Compendium of Utterly Useless TriviaNotebook
by Alan Coren
Here are a few statistics about J. K. Rowling you may not yet have read.
1 If all the published copies, hardback and paperback, in all translations, of the six Harry Potter books were laid flat, edge to edge, they would entirely cover Brazil. EDITOR’S NOTE: IS THIS A GOAL? ARE THERE OTHER COUNTRIES WE’D RATHER COVER WITH POTTER BOOKS? MAYBE JUST COVER ALL THE U.S. RED STATES?
2 If, however, the Brazilian rainforest continued to be reduced at the current rate, by the afternoon of April 17, 2057, there would be room only for a single-volume tower of all the published copies of the, by then, seven Harry Potter books. It would be 48,977 miles high. It would be the only pile of books visible from Mars. EDITOR’S NOTE: BUT WILL THERE BE ANYONE ON MARS TO SEE IT?
3 Had, on May 16 last, J. K. Rowling put all her income from the five published Harry Potter books on Archer’s Folly in the 3.15 at Haydock Park, which came in by a short head at 100-1, she would have become richer than Bill Gates by £135.84. If, though, she had waited until this week’s publication of the sixth book and put all her accumulated money on Jiminy Cricket in the 2.45 at Sandown, she would now be in a position to buy North Dakota. EDITOR’S NOTE: CLEARLY SOME SORT OF BRIT RACING JOKE. (YOU CAN TELL IT’S A BRIT THING, SINCE THEY SEEM TO THINK BUYING NORTH DAKOTA IS SOMETHING TO STRIVE FOR).
4 The combined weight of all the six Harry Potter hardbacks, in all translations, is 143 tonnes heavier than Mount Snowdon. Were this to be added to the combined weight of all the six Harry Potter paperbacks, it would be 61 tonnes heavier than Ben Nevis. EDITOR’S NOTE: ??????
5 Of all the children, worldwide, who have bought a Harry Potter, only 32 per cent know it is a book. The largest category of those who think it is something else is the 27 per cent who think it is a box of tissues that opens at the side. The smallest category of those who think it is something else is the 0.0001 per cent, located in an exclusive finishing school in South Kensington, who believe it to be a deportment aid. EDITOR’S NOTE: OH THOSE WACKY BRITS! (IS IT TOO LATE TO TAKE BACK THAT SILLY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE THINGY?)
6 Were all the semi-colons in all the Harry Potter books, in all translations, to be typed out in a straight line, they would circle the world twice. Bear in mind that there are no semi-colons in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu or Inuit. EDITOR’S NOTE: NO SEMI-COLONS IN URDU? TAKE THEM OFF THE INVITE LIST!
7 If all cigarette manufacture suddenly stopped in China, and the 73 per cent of the population who smoked managed to get their hands on all the Harry Potter books ever published, they would have enough paper to make themselves 20 roll-ups a day for the next 289 years.
8 The quantity of adhesive used to secure all the pages of the six Harry Potter volumes to their bindings would be enough to cover Wales in linoleum floor-tiles. EDITOR’S NOTE: AGAIN…IS THIS SOMETHING WE WERE LOOKING TO DO?
9 Were the President of the United States ever to yield to pressure from fundamentalist Christian objectors and order every copy of Harry Potter to be burnt, global warming would increase by 2.7 per cent. Even on the most optimistic estimate, this would leave only the top 18.7 metres of the Blackpool Tower visible.
10 However, if, in the (admittedly unlikely) event of the President of the United States having signed up to the Kyoto Protocols, the books were not burnt but pulped, enough material would be produced to rebuild Fellugia entirely in papier-mâché. EDITOR’S NOTE: NOW WE’RE TALKIN!
11 If each copy of every Harry Potter book printed consisted of words different from those in every other copy, it is statistically more than likely that one of the books could have been typed by a chimpanzee.EDITOR’S NOTE: ALBEIT, AN EXTREMELY TALENTED AND PROLIFIC CHIMPANZEE.
12 In a recent attempt by a team of mathematicians in Istanbul to work out how much J. K. Rowling had earned in Turkish lire (at 2,318.9 to the £), the university computer blew out all windows within a diameter of 300 metres. EDITOR’S NOTE: HARRY POTTER AND THINGS BLOWING UP. LIFE IS GOOD!
13 You do not have to share J. K. Rowling’s passion for necromancy to be troubled by the number 13. All you have to share is common superstition. For if all the copies of Harry Potter ever sold were to be placed in piles of 13 around the world, the statistical likelihood of anyone walking past one of them subsequently falling through an open manhole beggars belief.
NB.
All these statistics are taken from an advance copy of The Guinness Book of J.K.Rowling, to be published at midnight on July 31. Those wishing to begin queueing outside bookshops now are advised to seek tickets for places at almost any website you can shake a broomstick at.
J.K. Rowling Hogwarts And All
As the much awaited Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince arrives in stores, J.K. Rowling talks frankly to Lev Grossman about fantasy, fathers and how the magic is almost over
By LEV GROSSMAN
Here is a J.K. Rowling who lives in the hearts and minds of children everywhere. She has a fairy wand and hair of spun gold, and when she laughs her tinkly laugh, tiny silver bubbles come out of her mouth.
That J.K. Rowling, however, doesn't exist. Here's a look at the real Jo Rowling (rhymes with bowling, by the way, not howling) at work five years ago on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: "Goblet--oh, my God. That was the period where I was chewing Nicorette. And then I started smoking again, but I didn't stop the Nicorette. And I swear on my children's lives, I was going to bed at night and having palpitations and having to get up and drink some wine to put myself into a sufficient stupor."
Little children everywhere should be grateful for the real Jo Rowling. Because if the imaginary one had written the Harry Potter books, just think how incredibly boring they'd be.
The real Rowling's hair is sort of gold, although at the moment it has about an inch of dark roots. Which is understandable, since in the past six months she has given birth to her third child--daughter Mackenzie--and completed the sixth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released promptly at midnight a week ago Friday.
At 39, Rowling is a tall handsome woman with a long face, a slightly crooked nose and interestingly hooded eyes. Sitting at a conference table in a bungalow adjoining her stately Edinburgh home (neither her only nor her stateliest home), she talks rapidly, even a little nervously. She uses the word obviously way more often than the average person does, and she likes to say outrageous things, then break out into fits of throaty alto laughter to show you she's just joking. Rowling wears all black--a floppy black sweater, black pants. A glance under the table reveals shiny black leather boots with steel spike heels that are, at the very least, three inches long.
Fans send Rowling wands and quills by the bushel, but she admits, a bit shamefacedly, that she never actually uses them and that the wands go straight to her oldest daughter, Jessica. The most popular living fantasy writer in the world doesn't even especially like fantasy novels. It wasn't until after Sorcerer's Stone was published that it even occurred to her that she had written one.
"That's the honest truth," she says. "You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that's what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy."
Rowling has never finished The Lord of the Rings. She hasn't even read all of C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels, which her books get compared to a lot. There's something about Lewis' sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves.
"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex," Rowling says. "I have a big problem with that."
Rowling certainly isn't afraid of sex, as Order of the Phoenix--which had Harry making out with the beautiful, grieving Cho Chang--ably demonstrated. Harry and his friends are now 16, and it would just be weird if Harry didn't have more on his mind than wands and snitches.
"Because of the demands of the adventure that Harry is following, he has had less sexual experience than boys of his age might have had," Rowling allows. "But I really wanted my heroes to grow up. Ron's hormones get fuller play in book six." Cue the throaty alto laughter. "Basically it dawns on Ron that Hermione's had some action, Harry's had some action and he's never got close!"
It's precisely Rowling's lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness, her refusal to buy into the basic cliches of fantasy, that make her such a great fantasy writer. The genre tends to be deeply conservative--politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves. Rowling's books aren't like that. They take place in the 1990s--not in some never-never Narnia but in modern-day Mugglish England, with cars, telephones and PlayStations. Rowling adapts an inherently conservative genre for her own progressive purposes. Her Hogwarts is secular and sexual and multicultural and multiracial and even sort of multimedia, with all those talking ghosts. If Lewis showed up there, let's face it, he'd probably wind up a Death Eater. EDITOR’S NOTE: LOL!
Granted, Rowling's books begin like invitations to garden-variety escapism: Ooh, Harry isn't really a poor orphan; he's actually a wealthy wizard who rides a secret train to a castle, and so on. But as they go on, you realize that while the fun stuff is pure cotton candy, the problems are very real--embarrassment, prejudice, depression, anger, poverty, death. "I was trying to subvert the genre," Rowling explains bluntly. "Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does not make his world better significantly. The relationships make his world better. Magic in many ways complicates his life."
And unlike Lewis, whose books are drenched in theology, Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. "I don't think that it's at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don't," she says. "I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?"
"Although," she adds, "undeniably, morals are drawn."
But she doesn't make it easy. In Goblet, the good-hearted Cedric Diggory dies for no reason. In Phoenix, we learn that Harry's dad, whom he idealized, had been an arrogant bully. People aren't good and bad by nature; they change and transform and struggle. As Dumbledore tells Harry, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
Granted, we know Harry will not succumb to anger and evil. But we never stop feeling that he could. (Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. "Um. I don't think they're that secular," she says, choosing her words slowly. "But, obviously, Dumbledore is not Jesus.") EDITOR’S NOTE: ONCE AGAIN, SO MANY PARALLELS WITH UNCLE GEORGE, WHO REFUSES TO BE DRAWN INTO THE DISCUSSIONS OF ‘THE FORCE’ AS RELIGION, OR GOD.
There are limits to Harry Potter's sophistication. Since Sorcerer's Stone was published in 1998, world events have moved to the point where they threaten to ask more from the books than they have to give. By Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, Harry is embroiled in a borderless, semi-civil war with a shadowy, hidden leader whose existence the government ignored until disaster forced the issue and who is supported by a secret network of sleeper agents willing to resort to tactics of shocking cruelty. The kids who grew up on Harry Potter--you could call them Generation Hex EDITOR’S NOTE: OH FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE. PULEESE. --are the kids who grew up with the pervasive threat of terrorism, and it's inevitable that on some level they'll make a connection between the two.
Which isn't a terrible thing necessarily. But the series' major shortcoming to date is the flatness of Harry's antagonist Voldemort (whose name Rowling pronounces with a silent t). EDITOR’S NOTE: WELL, ISN’T THAT PECULIAR. SINCE THE MOVIES MADE THE DECISION TO PRONOUNCE THE ‘T’, AND WE HAD ASSUMED THIS WAS ON JKR’S INSTRUCTIONS .
In the past few books, Voldemort has managed to assemble a body, but he still lacks any kind of realistic motivation. You get no sense of where his boundless enthusiasm for being evil comes from. "You will," Rowling says. "There is obviously a big gap there, and in six Harry finds out a lot of Voldemort's history. Though he was never that nice a guy." She laughs.
No, he wasn't. Half-Blood Prince goes a long way, finally, to working through Rowling's take on the psychology of evil, largely through a kind of Pensieve-aided documentary of Voldemort's early life. Much of Rowling's understanding of the origins of evil has to do with the role of the father in family life. "As I look back over the five published books," she says, "I realize that it's kind of a litany of bad fathers. That's where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn't get good fathering." Some of that must surely flow from her own experiences: her relationship with her father has been uneven, and the father of her oldest daughter is no longer part of Rowling's life.
Despite her colossal success, which has run her personal fortune into the hundreds of millions, you can still feel Rowling's enormous, churning ambition for her work, which seems to be fueled at least in part by lingering feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe it's her well-known history as a onetime careerless divorced mom who spent nearly a year on public assistance, but she still constantly questions her writing, reviewing it like a boxer watching tapes of his fights.
"I think Phoenix could have been shorter. I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end," she says. She is worried that Goblet was overpraised. "In every single book, there's stuff I would go back and rewrite," she says. "But I think I really planned the hell out of this one. I took three months and just sat there and went over and over and over the plan, really fine-tuned it, looked at it from every angle. I had learnt, maybe, from past mistakes."
This obsessive focus on perfection can leave Rowling a little unavailable to those around her. She tells the story of a conversation she had with her younger sister--Di, 38--about Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who Di feels sometimes lacks compassion for his charges. "She said, 'That's like you.' And I said, 'What's that supposed to mean?' As sisters do. And she said, 'Well, you are kind of detached.' That was, you know, uncomfortable, and probably quite illuminating. I maybe wouldn't find it as easy as she does to say, 'That person is my very best friend in the world.'"
Rowling is about to say goodbye to a very good friend: Half-Blood Prince is book six of a planned seven, and then that's all she wrote. "I'll be so sad to think I'll never write a Harry-Ron-Hermione sentence again," she says. But her feelings aren't entirely unmixed. "Part of me will be glad when it's over. Family life will become more normal. It will be a chance to write other things."
Hang on--other things? It's disconcerting to think of Rowling stepping out on Harry and the gang with another set of characters. But at least we can say Harry is Rowling's last wizard. From here on out, it's Muggles only. "I think I can say categorically that I will not write another fantasy after Harry," she says, making herself and her publicists, who hover nearby, visibly nervous. "Wait, now I'm panicking. Oh, my God! Yes, I'm sure I can say that. I think I will have exhausted the possibilities of that. For me." Beyond that, she isn't giving away many clues, but she's approaching the project with her usual ruthless skepticism. "We'll have to see if it's good enough to be published. I mean, that is a real concern, obviously, because the first thing I write post Harry could be absolutely dreadful, and, you know, people will buy it. So, you know, you're left with this real insecurity."
But future insecurities can wait. Rowling still has book seven to worry about. She has already started writing. "It will be a very different kind of book," she says, "because I kind of cue up the shot at the end of six, and you're left with a very clear idea of what Harry's going to do next."
"And," she adds in an uncharacteristic moment of hubris, "it will be exciting!" Then she immediately retreats into self-deprecation. "You don't know! You might read six and think, Ah, I won't bother."
But that, for once, is pure fantasy. Obviously. EDITOR’S NOTE: OBVIOUSLY, INDEED.
USA TODAY
Potter fans prepare for bumpy ride with dark 'Half-Blood Prince'
NEW YORK (AP) — All of those happy Harry Potter fans, books at last in hand, may well be in for a good cry.
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth of J.K. Rowling's phenomenal, record-breaking series, is also her darkest, most grown-up work — haunted by death, complicated by love and heartbreaking to critics. "Break out the tissues," warns Associated Press reviewer Deepti Hajela.
But the age of Potter VI dawned at midnight Saturday with millions of smiles and a bit of a wink from Rowling. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the author emerged from behind a secret panel inside the city's medieval castle, settled into a leather easy chair and read an excerpt from the sixth chapter to a super-select group of 70 children from around the world.
"You get a lot of answers in this book," Rowling, a resident of Edinburgh, said as she arrived at the castle before thousands of adoring fans. "I can't wait for everyone to read it."
At the Barnes & Noble in New York's Union Square, 20-year-old Rachel Grandy was first in line, arriving early on a sticky summer morning and getting her book at midnight, some 16 hours later. "I can't believe that I have the first copy," said Grandy, a student at Hunter College. "It's totally boggling my mind right now."
In London, events were muted by the July 7 subway and bus bombings, which killed some 50 people. Book and magazine chain WH Smith scrapped a planned midnight launch at King's Cross Station, from whose fictional Platform 9 3/4 Harry catches the train to Hogwarts at the start of each term. The deadliest of the day's four attacks was on a subway near King's Cross.
"We're very much of the message that it's business as usual — London's open for business and we want to celebrate this book," said John Webb, children's buyer at Waterstone's, which said 300,000 people attended midnight openings at more than 100 stores across Britain.
At the Wangfujing Bookstore in downtown Beijing, about 40 people lined up in the early morning to buy "Half-Blood Prince." Rowling's books are so popular in China that an unknown Chinese author once produced an entire fake adventure, "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon."
It was a kooky midnight countdown in Union Square, as a person in a white owl suit emerged from behind green curtains with a box and slowly walked over to a cash register. The owl handed the box to workers behind the counter and the first book was removed. Jim Dale, the beloved, multivoiced narrator of the audio books, began reading. EDITOR'S NOTE: JIM DALE ROCKS!
In Dallas, about 200 Harry fans waited in the dark, mingling in an unlit parking lot, after storms knocked out power at a Barnes & Noble store. White horses posing as unicorns paraded down the main street of Wilmington, Ohio, where Books 'N' More quickly sold hundreds of Potters.
And at a bookstore in downtown Chicago, 10-year-old William Hilkert said he was confident the latest book will be worth the wait.
"If you can write five goods books in a row, you can write six good books in a row," said Hilkert, who was visiting from Cleveland with his father.EDITOR’S NOTE: WELL PUT, WILLIAM!
Since Rowling first introduced Harry and his fellow students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to the world in 1997, the books have become a global phenomenon, selling 270 million copies in 62 languages and inspiring a series of movies. Rowling is now the richest woman in Britain, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $1 billion.
With only brief interruptions, "Half-Blood Prince" has topped the charts of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com since last December, when Rowling announced that she had completed it. Pre-orders worldwide already are in the millions and other Potter products are selling strongly, including the audio book, a "deluxe" edition of "Half-Blood Prince" and a box set of the previous five books.
Publication has sparked a price war in England, with many chains selling the book for about half the $29.95 cover price. In the United States, the online retailer Alibris.com is offering $5, plus postage, for used copies. Scholastic Inc., Rowling's U.S. publisher, has also joined the competition, offering a 20% discount on its Web site.
"I am always disappointed when publishers sell books directly to the consumer, bypassing their retail partners," said Mitchell Kaplan, president of the American Booksellers Association. "Selling it at a discount makes it more frustrating."
Scholastic is releasing more than 10 million copies. Waterstone's predicts 2 million copies will be sold in Britain, where Bloomsbury publishes the book, and 10 million worldwide in the first 24 hours.
The new work has been preceded by months of publicity, hype, plot leaks and legal action.
Canadian publisher Raincoast sought a court injunction after a Vancouver store accidentally sold 14 copies last week. A judge ordered customers not to discuss the book, copy it, sell it or read it before its release.
Canadian sales could be helped by an unexpected market: U.S. readers, thanks to a plea from Greenpeace. On its Web site, the environmental group notes that Raincoast uses 100% recycled paper and criticizes Scholastic for not doing the same.
"We have some magic up our sleeves too," reads a message posted on the site, "a link to the Canadian publisher of 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince,' who can send you a tree-friendly version of this popular book."EDITOR’S NOTE: OH DRAT. WISH I’D KNOWN ABOUT THIS. AH WELL….
AND HOW ABOUT A SPECIAL WEEKEND TREAT...SOME PICS FROM THE UPCOMING GOF MOVIE!?
EDITOR'S NOTE: EW GOF COVER
EDITO'S NOTE: EW GOF INSIDE
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, AT TOM RIDDLE SR.'S GRAVE
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, DAN RADCLIFFE AND DIRECTOR MIKE NEWELL
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, IN THE OWELRY
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, THE QUIDDITCH WORLD CUP CAMPSITE
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF PR SHOT
BUT FOR THE PURPOSES OF WEEKEND POSTING....OUR MOTTO, LESS THINKING, MORE PICTURES....HERE'S SOME MORE SEMI-RANDOM HARRY POTTER'ING.
HERE’S THE HP STUFF THAT ISN’T SPOILER’IFIC OR REVIEWS OF HP6.
JUST SOME ODDS-N-ENDS, HARRY POTTER-STYLE.
Pirates quick to scan new Potter book online
LONDON -- The sixth book in the Harry Potter series, the fastest-selling book of all time, has become among the quickest to fall prey to Internet piracy, with illicit copies available online within hours of its release. Tech-savvy fans of the boy wizard teamed up to scan the entire 600-plus-page book into digital form, with unauthorized e-book copies appearing online less than 12 hours after "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" went on sale on Saturday. Copies of the audio version of the book were also widespread on file-trading networks such as BitTorrent. The full text was available for free on the Internet as an unauthorized e-book in China, the Beijing News reported on Wednesday. A lawyer for author J.K. Rowling's agents, Christopher Little, said his firm was working to combat the piracy but admitted that some illicit copies would probably slip through EDITOR’S NOTE: ON THE PLUS SIDE, KIDS ARE READING!
BUT WAIT….THERE’S MORE DEATH-EATER ACTIVITY…..
Pirates of the Potter-ian
By Robert Andrews
02:00 AM Jul. 21, 2005 PT
Author J.K. Rowling has been branded a "Luddite fool" for inadvertently encouraging fans to pirate the latest Harry Potter book only hours after its official release.EDITOR’S NOTE: SO IT’S HER FAULT THAT PEOPLE ARE IMPATIENT AND GREEDY AND IMMORAL?
The sixth installment in the popular series was published worldwide Friday and is expected to further enhance what has become a multibillion-dollar publishing phenomenon.
But within hours, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been scanned and put online by an underground collection of fans capitalizing on Rowling's decision not to release an official e-book version.
Rowling's publisher had hoped to maintain a strict embargo until midnight Friday. But by then, hundreds were already reading the book thanks to Potter fans who organized over Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, to scan and distribute the book.
Potter fans coordinated a worldwide effort to turn the book's 672 pages into a home-brew digital copy -- now available on file-sharing networks and by using BitTorrent.
"I'd love to see the expression on Rowling's face when she finds out that this book got ripped within, what, 11 hours of the release?" one of those involved in the operation told cohorts in the main public IRC chat room, #pottermania.
Although Potter has become a multimedia cash cow, with 52 million books sold and products ranging from figurines to a $2.35 billion movie series, Rowling has so far decided against publishing the stories in e-book format, a medium growing by up to 40 percent annually, according to the New York-based Open eBook Forum, a trade body.
"The store where I work had the shipment by Wednesday, but they weren't legally allowed to sell them until Friday night," another of the scanners said in a chat room. "I didn't read it because I'm still reading book one, EDITOR’S NOTE: AND BOY ARE YOUR LIPS TIRED? but I did scan it like crazy so people could get a head start on it. We only got up to chapter seven; I stopped when you could legally buy it."
After fellow fantasy fans contributed the missing scans and chipped in to run optical-character-recognition software on the pages, a Russian website used by the team to host the ripped book received 80,000 hits, according to the individual.
Unauthorized versions of the book are available in Word, PDF and plain-text formats suitable for handhelds and other devices, alongside an audio recording thought to be the as-yet-unreleased official narration.
The runaway success of the Potter series has seen British author Rowling amass a personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. Her latest installment shifted 2 million copies in the United Kingdom alone on its first day, breaking a record. But Rowling's camp has declined to publish Potter in electronic format, citing security concerns.
"You should never trust any Harry Potter e-books offered for download from the internet or on P2P/file-trading networks," wrote Rowling on her website in January while warning fans of a virus masquerading as a Potter e-book.
David Rothman, a Virginia-based e-book advocate and author who runs the TeleRead digital libraries project, said Rowling was a "Luddite fool" and called her stance "very shortsighted."
"Either she is ignoring the facts or doesn't want to take a little time to understand the technology and allow for her prejudices," he said. EDITOR’S NOTE: AND I’M SURE CALLING HER NAMES IS GOING TO HELP YOUR CASE.
The Half-Blood Prince is not the first time readers have created their own digital copies of books, Rothman added, blaming the practice on a muddled e-book market with multiple, incompatible formats and a paucity of big-name offerings.
"The industry has done so badly because of all those clashing formats, over-restrictive digital rights management (or DRM) and the omission of some of the most popular titles," he said.
"The best DRM is reasonable prices," he added. "At $10 or $5 for a legit copy, piracy wouldn't be as tempting. (But publishers) won't even spend a few extra bucks to see what digital magic Potter can do for their bottom lines."
Rowling's agent said action would be taken against sites hosting copies of the book to defend the author's rights and shield children from offensive material.
"We want to prevent piracy for many reasons, financial being the very last one of those," said Neil Blair, a lawyer and partner at the Christopher Little Literary Agency. "We have not yet taken the decision to license e-book rights -- a position shared by most, if not all, children's book authors. My guess is that official e-books suffer piracy, too, so maybe just by offering an official product you won't completely remove the piracy.
"Well over 10 million people (bought the book) on July 16 alone; people still like reading books on paper. Whilst I do not want to belittle the piracy, proportionally compared to traditional sales, it is tiny."
Open eBook Forum executive director Nick Bogaty acknowledged the e-book market is "miniscule" and limited to enthusiasts. But he said several big draws -- like Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code -- were now on board. He urged Rowling's publishers to offer book downloads through trusted channels like Amazon.com or Jkrowling.com.
But when the next installment in the Potter saga -- the seventh and last in the series -- arrives, the scanners will be ready.
"For the next book, we're going to be prepared," said the Half-Blood Prince scanner. "The people who'll be helping me will be at their computers waiting for me to get home with it and I'll be calling in sick to work for a day or two so I can scan it without interruptions." EDITOR’S NOTE: I LOVE TO HEAR ABOUT CRIMINALS PLANNING THEIR ILLICIT ACTIVITIES WELL IN ADVANCE. MAYBE THE ENFORCEMENT FOLKS CAN SCHEDULE ARRESTS ACCORDINGLY?
Harry Potter and the Compendium of Utterly Useless TriviaNotebook
by Alan Coren
Here are a few statistics about J. K. Rowling you may not yet have read.
1 If all the published copies, hardback and paperback, in all translations, of the six Harry Potter books were laid flat, edge to edge, they would entirely cover Brazil. EDITOR’S NOTE: IS THIS A GOAL? ARE THERE OTHER COUNTRIES WE’D RATHER COVER WITH POTTER BOOKS? MAYBE JUST COVER ALL THE U.S. RED STATES?
2 If, however, the Brazilian rainforest continued to be reduced at the current rate, by the afternoon of April 17, 2057, there would be room only for a single-volume tower of all the published copies of the, by then, seven Harry Potter books. It would be 48,977 miles high. It would be the only pile of books visible from Mars. EDITOR’S NOTE: BUT WILL THERE BE ANYONE ON MARS TO SEE IT?
3 Had, on May 16 last, J. K. Rowling put all her income from the five published Harry Potter books on Archer’s Folly in the 3.15 at Haydock Park, which came in by a short head at 100-1, she would have become richer than Bill Gates by £135.84. If, though, she had waited until this week’s publication of the sixth book and put all her accumulated money on Jiminy Cricket in the 2.45 at Sandown, she would now be in a position to buy North Dakota. EDITOR’S NOTE: CLEARLY SOME SORT OF BRIT RACING JOKE. (YOU CAN TELL IT’S A BRIT THING, SINCE THEY SEEM TO THINK BUYING NORTH DAKOTA IS SOMETHING TO STRIVE FOR).
4 The combined weight of all the six Harry Potter hardbacks, in all translations, is 143 tonnes heavier than Mount Snowdon. Were this to be added to the combined weight of all the six Harry Potter paperbacks, it would be 61 tonnes heavier than Ben Nevis. EDITOR’S NOTE: ??????
5 Of all the children, worldwide, who have bought a Harry Potter, only 32 per cent know it is a book. The largest category of those who think it is something else is the 27 per cent who think it is a box of tissues that opens at the side. The smallest category of those who think it is something else is the 0.0001 per cent, located in an exclusive finishing school in South Kensington, who believe it to be a deportment aid. EDITOR’S NOTE: OH THOSE WACKY BRITS! (IS IT TOO LATE TO TAKE BACK THAT SILLY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE THINGY?)
6 Were all the semi-colons in all the Harry Potter books, in all translations, to be typed out in a straight line, they would circle the world twice. Bear in mind that there are no semi-colons in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu or Inuit. EDITOR’S NOTE: NO SEMI-COLONS IN URDU? TAKE THEM OFF THE INVITE LIST!
7 If all cigarette manufacture suddenly stopped in China, and the 73 per cent of the population who smoked managed to get their hands on all the Harry Potter books ever published, they would have enough paper to make themselves 20 roll-ups a day for the next 289 years.
8 The quantity of adhesive used to secure all the pages of the six Harry Potter volumes to their bindings would be enough to cover Wales in linoleum floor-tiles. EDITOR’S NOTE: AGAIN…IS THIS SOMETHING WE WERE LOOKING TO DO?
9 Were the President of the United States ever to yield to pressure from fundamentalist Christian objectors and order every copy of Harry Potter to be burnt, global warming would increase by 2.7 per cent. Even on the most optimistic estimate, this would leave only the top 18.7 metres of the Blackpool Tower visible.
10 However, if, in the (admittedly unlikely) event of the President of the United States having signed up to the Kyoto Protocols, the books were not burnt but pulped, enough material would be produced to rebuild Fellugia entirely in papier-mâché. EDITOR’S NOTE: NOW WE’RE TALKIN!
11 If each copy of every Harry Potter book printed consisted of words different from those in every other copy, it is statistically more than likely that one of the books could have been typed by a chimpanzee.EDITOR’S NOTE: ALBEIT, AN EXTREMELY TALENTED AND PROLIFIC CHIMPANZEE.
12 In a recent attempt by a team of mathematicians in Istanbul to work out how much J. K. Rowling had earned in Turkish lire (at 2,318.9 to the £), the university computer blew out all windows within a diameter of 300 metres. EDITOR’S NOTE: HARRY POTTER AND THINGS BLOWING UP. LIFE IS GOOD!
13 You do not have to share J. K. Rowling’s passion for necromancy to be troubled by the number 13. All you have to share is common superstition. For if all the copies of Harry Potter ever sold were to be placed in piles of 13 around the world, the statistical likelihood of anyone walking past one of them subsequently falling through an open manhole beggars belief.
NB.
All these statistics are taken from an advance copy of The Guinness Book of J.K.Rowling, to be published at midnight on July 31. Those wishing to begin queueing outside bookshops now are advised to seek tickets for places at almost any website you can shake a broomstick at.
J.K. Rowling Hogwarts And All
As the much awaited Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince arrives in stores, J.K. Rowling talks frankly to Lev Grossman about fantasy, fathers and how the magic is almost over
By LEV GROSSMAN
Here is a J.K. Rowling who lives in the hearts and minds of children everywhere. She has a fairy wand and hair of spun gold, and when she laughs her tinkly laugh, tiny silver bubbles come out of her mouth.
That J.K. Rowling, however, doesn't exist. Here's a look at the real Jo Rowling (rhymes with bowling, by the way, not howling) at work five years ago on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: "Goblet--oh, my God. That was the period where I was chewing Nicorette. And then I started smoking again, but I didn't stop the Nicorette. And I swear on my children's lives, I was going to bed at night and having palpitations and having to get up and drink some wine to put myself into a sufficient stupor."
Little children everywhere should be grateful for the real Jo Rowling. Because if the imaginary one had written the Harry Potter books, just think how incredibly boring they'd be.
The real Rowling's hair is sort of gold, although at the moment it has about an inch of dark roots. Which is understandable, since in the past six months she has given birth to her third child--daughter Mackenzie--and completed the sixth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released promptly at midnight a week ago Friday.
At 39, Rowling is a tall handsome woman with a long face, a slightly crooked nose and interestingly hooded eyes. Sitting at a conference table in a bungalow adjoining her stately Edinburgh home (neither her only nor her stateliest home), she talks rapidly, even a little nervously. She uses the word obviously way more often than the average person does, and she likes to say outrageous things, then break out into fits of throaty alto laughter to show you she's just joking. Rowling wears all black--a floppy black sweater, black pants. A glance under the table reveals shiny black leather boots with steel spike heels that are, at the very least, three inches long.
Fans send Rowling wands and quills by the bushel, but she admits, a bit shamefacedly, that she never actually uses them and that the wands go straight to her oldest daughter, Jessica. The most popular living fantasy writer in the world doesn't even especially like fantasy novels. It wasn't until after Sorcerer's Stone was published that it even occurred to her that she had written one.
"That's the honest truth," she says. "You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that's what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy."
Rowling has never finished The Lord of the Rings. She hasn't even read all of C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels, which her books get compared to a lot. There's something about Lewis' sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves.
"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex," Rowling says. "I have a big problem with that."
Rowling certainly isn't afraid of sex, as Order of the Phoenix--which had Harry making out with the beautiful, grieving Cho Chang--ably demonstrated. Harry and his friends are now 16, and it would just be weird if Harry didn't have more on his mind than wands and snitches.
"Because of the demands of the adventure that Harry is following, he has had less sexual experience than boys of his age might have had," Rowling allows. "But I really wanted my heroes to grow up. Ron's hormones get fuller play in book six." Cue the throaty alto laughter. "Basically it dawns on Ron that Hermione's had some action, Harry's had some action and he's never got close!"
It's precisely Rowling's lack of sentimentality, her earthy, salty realness, her refusal to buy into the basic cliches of fantasy, that make her such a great fantasy writer. The genre tends to be deeply conservative--politically, culturally, psychologically. It looks backward to an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves. Rowling's books aren't like that. They take place in the 1990s--not in some never-never Narnia but in modern-day Mugglish England, with cars, telephones and PlayStations. Rowling adapts an inherently conservative genre for her own progressive purposes. Her Hogwarts is secular and sexual and multicultural and multiracial and even sort of multimedia, with all those talking ghosts. If Lewis showed up there, let's face it, he'd probably wind up a Death Eater. EDITOR’S NOTE: LOL!
Granted, Rowling's books begin like invitations to garden-variety escapism: Ooh, Harry isn't really a poor orphan; he's actually a wealthy wizard who rides a secret train to a castle, and so on. But as they go on, you realize that while the fun stuff is pure cotton candy, the problems are very real--embarrassment, prejudice, depression, anger, poverty, death. "I was trying to subvert the genre," Rowling explains bluntly. "Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does not make his world better significantly. The relationships make his world better. Magic in many ways complicates his life."
And unlike Lewis, whose books are drenched in theology, Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. "I don't think that it's at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don't," she says. "I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?"
"Although," she adds, "undeniably, morals are drawn."
But she doesn't make it easy. In Goblet, the good-hearted Cedric Diggory dies for no reason. In Phoenix, we learn that Harry's dad, whom he idealized, had been an arrogant bully. People aren't good and bad by nature; they change and transform and struggle. As Dumbledore tells Harry, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
Granted, we know Harry will not succumb to anger and evil. But we never stop feeling that he could. (Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. "Um. I don't think they're that secular," she says, choosing her words slowly. "But, obviously, Dumbledore is not Jesus.") EDITOR’S NOTE: ONCE AGAIN, SO MANY PARALLELS WITH UNCLE GEORGE, WHO REFUSES TO BE DRAWN INTO THE DISCUSSIONS OF ‘THE FORCE’ AS RELIGION, OR GOD.
There are limits to Harry Potter's sophistication. Since Sorcerer's Stone was published in 1998, world events have moved to the point where they threaten to ask more from the books than they have to give. By Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, Harry is embroiled in a borderless, semi-civil war with a shadowy, hidden leader whose existence the government ignored until disaster forced the issue and who is supported by a secret network of sleeper agents willing to resort to tactics of shocking cruelty. The kids who grew up on Harry Potter--you could call them Generation Hex EDITOR’S NOTE: OH FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE. PULEESE. --are the kids who grew up with the pervasive threat of terrorism, and it's inevitable that on some level they'll make a connection between the two.
Which isn't a terrible thing necessarily. But the series' major shortcoming to date is the flatness of Harry's antagonist Voldemort (whose name Rowling pronounces with a silent t). EDITOR’S NOTE: WELL, ISN’T THAT PECULIAR. SINCE THE MOVIES MADE THE DECISION TO PRONOUNCE THE ‘T’, AND WE HAD ASSUMED THIS WAS ON JKR’S INSTRUCTIONS .
In the past few books, Voldemort has managed to assemble a body, but he still lacks any kind of realistic motivation. You get no sense of where his boundless enthusiasm for being evil comes from. "You will," Rowling says. "There is obviously a big gap there, and in six Harry finds out a lot of Voldemort's history. Though he was never that nice a guy." She laughs.
No, he wasn't. Half-Blood Prince goes a long way, finally, to working through Rowling's take on the psychology of evil, largely through a kind of Pensieve-aided documentary of Voldemort's early life. Much of Rowling's understanding of the origins of evil has to do with the role of the father in family life. "As I look back over the five published books," she says, "I realize that it's kind of a litany of bad fathers. That's where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn't get good fathering." Some of that must surely flow from her own experiences: her relationship with her father has been uneven, and the father of her oldest daughter is no longer part of Rowling's life.
Despite her colossal success, which has run her personal fortune into the hundreds of millions, you can still feel Rowling's enormous, churning ambition for her work, which seems to be fueled at least in part by lingering feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe it's her well-known history as a onetime careerless divorced mom who spent nearly a year on public assistance, but she still constantly questions her writing, reviewing it like a boxer watching tapes of his fights.
"I think Phoenix could have been shorter. I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end," she says. She is worried that Goblet was overpraised. "In every single book, there's stuff I would go back and rewrite," she says. "But I think I really planned the hell out of this one. I took three months and just sat there and went over and over and over the plan, really fine-tuned it, looked at it from every angle. I had learnt, maybe, from past mistakes."
This obsessive focus on perfection can leave Rowling a little unavailable to those around her. She tells the story of a conversation she had with her younger sister--Di, 38--about Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who Di feels sometimes lacks compassion for his charges. "She said, 'That's like you.' And I said, 'What's that supposed to mean?' As sisters do. And she said, 'Well, you are kind of detached.' That was, you know, uncomfortable, and probably quite illuminating. I maybe wouldn't find it as easy as she does to say, 'That person is my very best friend in the world.'"
Rowling is about to say goodbye to a very good friend: Half-Blood Prince is book six of a planned seven, and then that's all she wrote. "I'll be so sad to think I'll never write a Harry-Ron-Hermione sentence again," she says. But her feelings aren't entirely unmixed. "Part of me will be glad when it's over. Family life will become more normal. It will be a chance to write other things."
Hang on--other things? It's disconcerting to think of Rowling stepping out on Harry and the gang with another set of characters. But at least we can say Harry is Rowling's last wizard. From here on out, it's Muggles only. "I think I can say categorically that I will not write another fantasy after Harry," she says, making herself and her publicists, who hover nearby, visibly nervous. "Wait, now I'm panicking. Oh, my God! Yes, I'm sure I can say that. I think I will have exhausted the possibilities of that. For me." Beyond that, she isn't giving away many clues, but she's approaching the project with her usual ruthless skepticism. "We'll have to see if it's good enough to be published. I mean, that is a real concern, obviously, because the first thing I write post Harry could be absolutely dreadful, and, you know, people will buy it. So, you know, you're left with this real insecurity."
But future insecurities can wait. Rowling still has book seven to worry about. She has already started writing. "It will be a very different kind of book," she says, "because I kind of cue up the shot at the end of six, and you're left with a very clear idea of what Harry's going to do next."
"And," she adds in an uncharacteristic moment of hubris, "it will be exciting!" Then she immediately retreats into self-deprecation. "You don't know! You might read six and think, Ah, I won't bother."
But that, for once, is pure fantasy. Obviously. EDITOR’S NOTE: OBVIOUSLY, INDEED.
USA TODAY
Potter fans prepare for bumpy ride with dark 'Half-Blood Prince'
NEW YORK (AP) — All of those happy Harry Potter fans, books at last in hand, may well be in for a good cry.
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth of J.K. Rowling's phenomenal, record-breaking series, is also her darkest, most grown-up work — haunted by death, complicated by love and heartbreaking to critics. "Break out the tissues," warns Associated Press reviewer Deepti Hajela.
But the age of Potter VI dawned at midnight Saturday with millions of smiles and a bit of a wink from Rowling. In Edinburgh, Scotland, the author emerged from behind a secret panel inside the city's medieval castle, settled into a leather easy chair and read an excerpt from the sixth chapter to a super-select group of 70 children from around the world.
"You get a lot of answers in this book," Rowling, a resident of Edinburgh, said as she arrived at the castle before thousands of adoring fans. "I can't wait for everyone to read it."
At the Barnes & Noble in New York's Union Square, 20-year-old Rachel Grandy was first in line, arriving early on a sticky summer morning and getting her book at midnight, some 16 hours later. "I can't believe that I have the first copy," said Grandy, a student at Hunter College. "It's totally boggling my mind right now."
In London, events were muted by the July 7 subway and bus bombings, which killed some 50 people. Book and magazine chain WH Smith scrapped a planned midnight launch at King's Cross Station, from whose fictional Platform 9 3/4 Harry catches the train to Hogwarts at the start of each term. The deadliest of the day's four attacks was on a subway near King's Cross.
"We're very much of the message that it's business as usual — London's open for business and we want to celebrate this book," said John Webb, children's buyer at Waterstone's, which said 300,000 people attended midnight openings at more than 100 stores across Britain.
At the Wangfujing Bookstore in downtown Beijing, about 40 people lined up in the early morning to buy "Half-Blood Prince." Rowling's books are so popular in China that an unknown Chinese author once produced an entire fake adventure, "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon."
It was a kooky midnight countdown in Union Square, as a person in a white owl suit emerged from behind green curtains with a box and slowly walked over to a cash register. The owl handed the box to workers behind the counter and the first book was removed. Jim Dale, the beloved, multivoiced narrator of the audio books, began reading. EDITOR'S NOTE: JIM DALE ROCKS!
In Dallas, about 200 Harry fans waited in the dark, mingling in an unlit parking lot, after storms knocked out power at a Barnes & Noble store. White horses posing as unicorns paraded down the main street of Wilmington, Ohio, where Books 'N' More quickly sold hundreds of Potters.
And at a bookstore in downtown Chicago, 10-year-old William Hilkert said he was confident the latest book will be worth the wait.
"If you can write five goods books in a row, you can write six good books in a row," said Hilkert, who was visiting from Cleveland with his father.EDITOR’S NOTE: WELL PUT, WILLIAM!
Since Rowling first introduced Harry and his fellow students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to the world in 1997, the books have become a global phenomenon, selling 270 million copies in 62 languages and inspiring a series of movies. Rowling is now the richest woman in Britain, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $1 billion.
With only brief interruptions, "Half-Blood Prince" has topped the charts of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com since last December, when Rowling announced that she had completed it. Pre-orders worldwide already are in the millions and other Potter products are selling strongly, including the audio book, a "deluxe" edition of "Half-Blood Prince" and a box set of the previous five books.
Publication has sparked a price war in England, with many chains selling the book for about half the $29.95 cover price. In the United States, the online retailer Alibris.com is offering $5, plus postage, for used copies. Scholastic Inc., Rowling's U.S. publisher, has also joined the competition, offering a 20% discount on its Web site.
"I am always disappointed when publishers sell books directly to the consumer, bypassing their retail partners," said Mitchell Kaplan, president of the American Booksellers Association. "Selling it at a discount makes it more frustrating."
Scholastic is releasing more than 10 million copies. Waterstone's predicts 2 million copies will be sold in Britain, where Bloomsbury publishes the book, and 10 million worldwide in the first 24 hours.
The new work has been preceded by months of publicity, hype, plot leaks and legal action.
Canadian publisher Raincoast sought a court injunction after a Vancouver store accidentally sold 14 copies last week. A judge ordered customers not to discuss the book, copy it, sell it or read it before its release.
Canadian sales could be helped by an unexpected market: U.S. readers, thanks to a plea from Greenpeace. On its Web site, the environmental group notes that Raincoast uses 100% recycled paper and criticizes Scholastic for not doing the same.
"We have some magic up our sleeves too," reads a message posted on the site, "a link to the Canadian publisher of 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince,' who can send you a tree-friendly version of this popular book."EDITOR’S NOTE: OH DRAT. WISH I’D KNOWN ABOUT THIS. AH WELL….
AND HOW ABOUT A SPECIAL WEEKEND TREAT...SOME PICS FROM THE UPCOMING GOF MOVIE!?
EDITOR'S NOTE: EW GOF COVER
EDITO'S NOTE: EW GOF INSIDE
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, AT TOM RIDDLE SR.'S GRAVE
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, DAN RADCLIFFE AND DIRECTOR MIKE NEWELL
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, IN THE OWELRY
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF, THE QUIDDITCH WORLD CUP CAMPSITE
EDITOR'S NOTE: GOF PR SHOT
posted by QOTD (the Queen of the Dweebs) at 6:19 PM
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