The Latest "Last" Harry Potter Book Arrives

J.K. Rowling decided to publish her latest book, Beedle the Bard, to raise money for her children's charity -- but American booksellers will be a second, and similarly needed, beneficiary.

Since Rowling's Harry Potter series first went on sale in 1997, each installment has been a Godsend to the book business, a rare bright spot in industry whose prospects are dimming by the day.

Shares of Borders have been on a downward slope since mid-2007, but fell sharply last week after the company's third-quarter results missed analyst expectations by a wide margin, and the bookseller shelved plans to put itself up for sale. Shares are currently down 94 percent for the year.

Barnes & Noble is in better shape than it's rival, but far from thriving, with shares down 53 percent in 2008.

Eight million copies of Beedle the Bard, a collection of five stories mentioned in the Harry Potter books, went on sale yesterday in more than 20 countries; that's nothing compared to the average of 57 million copies sold by each of the seven books in the Harry Potter series, but it still could be enough to make Beedle the Bard the No. 1 book of the holiday season -- possibly even the No. 1 book of 2008.

It might be too late for a single hit to make a critical difference for national chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble, but plenty of local booksellers will be thankfully for the shot in the arm during the holidays.

Rowling wrote Beedle after finishing the last of the Harry Potters last year, producing seven handwritten copies. Six were given away by Rowling as gifts, and one was bought at auction by Amazon.com for almost $3 million, with proceeds going to the Children's High Level Group, a charity she co-founded to support institutionalized children in Eastern Europe. (Amazon is printing 100,000 copies of a leather-bound collectors' edition priced at $100.)

Rowling decided to widely publish the book -- giving her royalties to charity -- following great demand from readers. Not to mention booksellers.

by Liz Gunnison