After 10 Years, Harry Potter Off NYT Best-Seller List

Only 7 copies of the Tales of Beedle the Bard exist

(NEWSER) - Sotheby’s figured The Tales of Beedle the Bard would fetch about $100,000 at auction—in retrospect, about 40 times too low. The book, a one-of-a-kind piece of the Harry Potter canon hand-written and illustrated by JK Rowling herself, fetched $3.98 million for charity today, Reuters reports. “Christmas has come early for me,” said an ecstatic Rowling. More»

She wanted to kill one of the trio 'out of pure spite'

(NEWSER) - Talk about your unforgivable curses. JK Rowling has revealed that she came very close to tossing an Avada Kedavra Ron Weasley’s way somewhere in the middle of the Harry Potter series. “I did seriously consider killing Ron,” Rowling tells Daniel Radcliffe in an interview on the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 2 DVD, which recently leaked online, according to the Guardian . More»

(NEWSER) - A new book by JK Rowling, patterned on one mentioned in the final Harry Potter installment, is set to be released tomorrow, Reuters reports. Profits from The Tales of Beedle the Bard will go to Rowling’s charity for Eastern European children. In addition to a global print run of 7.5 million, Amazon will release a collector’s edition facsimile of a handwritten, illustrated copy it bought at auction for $4 million. More»

Pounding Deathly Hallows will be a two-parter

(NEWSER) - The Harry Potter series finished after seven books but fans will have an eighth movie to look forward to, the Los Angeles Times reports. Warner Bros. has decided to split the final Potter book, the hefty 784-page Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films to come out in 2010 and 2011. Book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is in the middle of filming now. More»

Publishers hope guard dogs, armored vans will hex 'Hallows' leakers

(NEWSER) - Bloomsbury is shelling out millions to keep the latest and final installment in the Harry Potter series a chamber of secrets until its on-sale date next week. The British publishers are installing extra security and even guard-dogs at way stations as the Deathly Hallows ships to booksellers, and have a coven of lawyers ready to pounce on any breach in protocol. More»