Reuters One of the most popular books in history goes on sale this week - the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter series. Fans of the series have already reserved their copies at local bookshops, and the local radio station has been running promos and contests all week, awarding free copies to the winners. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hits local bookstores Saturday July 21, and anticipation over the ending is enough to make it the fastest selling novel of all time. On P-Day, as it has been dubbed, thousands of Potter fans dressed as witches and wizards will queue in front of bookstores in cities around the world, eager to learn the fate of Harry and his Hogwarts pals after author J.K. Rowling said she would kill off a number of the major characters. Twelve million copies of the 784-page tome have been printed for the US market alone, and copies are being kept under lock and key. Some families are imposing news blackouts in their homes to avoid spoilers. The publishing world has never known anything like it. What s different about Harry Potter is the marketing and PR program surrounding the launch. You wouldn t have got that in previous periods, said Caroline Horn, children s news editor at the Bookseller publication. Adults are also a huge target audience, the fictional boy wizard has made it on to the opinion page of the New York Times and writers Stephen King and John Irving have urged Rowling not to kill off her hero. Rowling herself will mark the publication with a midnight reading at London s Natural History Museum. The 41-year-old author described how she broke down in tears when completing the book. She started her 17-year journey as an unemployed single mother and now she is the world's first billionaire author. Rowling first thought up boy wizard Harry Potter on a train from Manchester to London, and worked for years to turn her idea into a novel. The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher s Stone, was published in 1997. The six books published so far have sold 325 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into 64 languages. Hollywood adaptations of the first four stories amassed $3.5 billion in the global box office, and the fifth, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is currently finding success in cinemas. The Potter phenomenon has been credited with encouraging young people to read more and revitalizing children s publishing, but it also has its downside. With so much money, and reader anticipation at stake, Rowling and her publishers have gone to great lengths to protect the contents of Deathly Hallows, including imposing a publishing embargo on book stores. One computer hacker claims to have leaked the ending of the book on to the Internet, which Rowling s publishers did not deny outright, and plot details are likely to appear online within hours of the book going on sale. -with Reuters
