Last Harry Potter book due July 21

How big do you think the Day One sales for this will be?

The last installment of the Harry Potter saga will be published on 21 July, author JK Rowling has announced.

She confirmed the date fans will be able to get their hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on her website.

[...]

This is the 10th anniversary of the first book of the hugely successful series being published.

Shops opened at midnight and queues formed when the last book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released.

It sold 2,009,574 copies in Britain on the first day of its release, publisher Bloomsbury said.

Note that's just Britain. The worldwide number is probably ten times that (I'm just guessing). I've reserved my copy via Amazon UK (we like the British versions at our house), that's all I know.

When asked about Harry's fate, Rowling has said she could understand authors who killed off their characters off, to stop others writing new adventures.

But she admitted being worried about the reaction from fans if the boy wizard came to a sticky end.

Rowling always made it clear the series would be in seven parts and much of the plot was almost set in stone.

In a recent web posting, she said: "I'm now writing scenes that have been planned, in some cases, for a dozen years or even more."

While I've no reason to doubt Rowling's assertion that there is no more to the Harry Potter series after Deathly Hallows, I continue to believe that we've not seen the end of the Potter universe. There's way too much demand, and a nearly endless amount of material, some more obscure than others, from which to mine for further stories. The question is whether Rowling maintains absolute control over her characters, or if she allows other people to offer their own interpretations, presumably within some defined set of rules. The "Star Trek" franchise is a good model for that - there's the official canon of the TV shows and movies, and there's the free-form stylings of the novels and comics, which allow for all kinds of exploration but which can be (and have been) contradicted by later official releases. We'll see.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on February 02, 2007 to Books