New Rowling book in stores Thursday

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By the Associated Press

Recession-hit booksellers are hoping for a magical boost from a new book by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

“The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” a collection of five fables mentioned in Rowling’s saga about the boy wizard, is being published around the world today with only a fraction of the carnival-like fanfare that greeted the Potter novels.

But expectations are high for the new book, which has a global print run of 8 million copies.

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The book’s print run sounds enormous until you compare it with the Potter books. The final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” sold 8 million copies in its first 24 hours and had a print run of 12 million in the United States alone.

Retailers are not expecting the new book to generate the frenzy that accompanied publication of “Deathly Hallows” in July 2007. But the day before publication, “Beedle the Bard” was No. 1 on Amazon’s British and U.S. Web sites. The Internet retailer is printing 100,000 copies of a leather-bound collectors’ edition priced at $100 in the United States and expects them to sell out.

Rowling is donating her royalties to the Children’s High Level Group, a charity she co-founded to support institutionalized children in Eastern Europe. Rowling has said she hopes the book will “not only be a welcome present to Harry Potter fans, but an opportunity to give these abandoned children a voice.”

Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have sold more than 400 million copies and been translated into 67 languages, wrote the Beedle tales after finishing “Deathly Hallows” last year. One of the stories, “The Tale Of The Three Brothers,” is recounted in “Deathly Hallows,” in which the storybook helps Harry and his friends defeat evil Lord Voldemort.

Rowling has described “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” as a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, calling it her goodbye to a world she lived in for 17 years.