Here's the latest on the last Harry Potter novel.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, July 21 (eight days after the release of the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Besides the $34.99 hardcover, Scholastic will offer a deluxe edition for $65 and a reinforced library edition for $39.99. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is being released under the Arthur A. Levine imprint and will have cover art by Mary GrandPre.
Within minutes of the Scholastic announcement, B&N, Borders and
Amazon announced that they had begun accepting pre-publication orders
for the book at steep discounts. B&N is offering the book for
$20.99--40% off--and B&N Members can receive it for $18.89, 46%
off. Borders is offering the book for 46% off. For its part, Amazon is
offering the hardcover for 46% and the deluxe edition for 40% off. In
case the price bloodbath escalates, Amazon and Borders guarantee all
customers will receive the lowest price offered by the sellers between
the order and the release date. Yesterday the book was the No. 1 title
on all three Web sites.
When the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,
was released on July 16, 2005, 6.9 million copies were sold the
first day. (About 1.5 million of those sales came from Amazon advance
orders.) Some 120 million copies of the six Harry Potter titles are in
print in the U.S. About 325 million copies have been sold worldwide.
