BBC News reports:

JK Rowling has said she is back at work, just days after her final Harry Potter book was published.

In an interview with the USA Today newspaper, the author said she was sad the Harry Potter series had come to an end, but would not stop writing.

“I’m sort of writing two things at the moment,” she said. “One is for children and the other is not for children.”

Rowling, 41, said she expected to drop one of her two new books, which is what happened when she started writing Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone in the 1990s.

“The weird thing is that this is exactly the way I started writing Harry,” she said.  “I was writing two things simultaneously for a year before Harry took over. So one will oust the other in due course, and I’ll know that’s my next thing.”

Link

Sales of the seventh and last Harry Potter book are, to no one’s surprise, breaking records in the publishing industry.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has thrown off concerns over internet spoilers and broken embargoes to confirm its position as the world’s fastest-selling book today, with Nielsen Bookscan estimating a staggering 2.7m copies sold in the UK of the seventh and final book during a hectic period of just 24 hours - a 35% increase on first-day sales of JK Rowling’s last blockbuster, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The figure, which includes sales through UK bookshops, supermarkets, internet sites and newspapers on Saturday July 21 2007, brings to a close a remarkable run for the popular children’s serial, which saw record-breaking sales of 1.8m copies in one day for the fifth book in the series, and 2m for the sixth. UK sales of the Harry Potter series as a whole now stand at 22.6m copies, with 72.1m copies sold worldwide.

Link to the Guardian article

So, here it is at last: The final confrontation between Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, the “symbol of hope” for both the Wizard and Muggle worlds, and Lord Voldemort, He Who Must Not Be Named, the nefarious leader of the Death Eaters and would-be ruler of all. Good versus Evil. Love versus Hate. The Seeker versus the Dark Lord.

View the full New York Times review here. There are some small spoilers but nothing, in my opinion, that would affect your enjoyment of the book.

Note: this post is spoiler-free.

Security guru Bruce Schneier writes:

It’s online [Note: link is spoiler safe]: digital photographs of every page are available on BitTorrent.

I’ve been fielding press calls on this, mostly from reporters asking me what the publisher could have done differently. Honestly, I don’t think it was possible to keep the book under wraps. There are millions of copies of the book headed to all four corners of the globe. There are simply too many people who must be trusted in order for the security to hold. And all it takes is one untrustworthy person — one truck driver, one bookstore owner, one warehouse worker — to leak the book.

But conversely, I don’t think the publishers should care. Anyone fan-crazed enough to read digital photographs of the pages a few days before the real copy comes out is also someone who is going to buy a real copy. And anyone who will read the digital photographs instead of the real book would have borrowed a copy from a friend. My guess is that the publishers will lose zero sales, and that the pre-release will simply increase the press frenzy.

I’m kind of amazed the book hadn’t leaked sooner.

Paper-based media also has its share of spoilers and early releases:

With only two days to go before the publication of the seventh and final instalment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun have broken one of the most stringent embargoes of recent times and published a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

After reading a copy “purchased at a New York City store yesterday”, one of America’s most influential literary critics, Michiko Kakutani, hails the volume in the New York Times as a dose of “good old-fashioned closure”.

Bloomsbury described the review as “very sad” to Reuters, pointing out that there was only one more day until the official release of the book around the world.

Link to Guardian article (some very vague spoilers, mostly about book structure/pacing)

Austrian Nobel-winning author Elfriede Jelinek is combining novel-writing with her affinity for cyberspace:

Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, “Neid” (German for “Envy”), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes as a “mixture of blog and prose” are already available on her site, www.elfriedejelinek.com, and there are more to come.

“It’s a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet,” Jelinek told the AP.

Although the German-language work will never appear in traditional book form and is primarily meant to be read on the screen, “anyone who wants to can download it or print it out,” she said.

Read the rest of the Chicago Tribune article here. Link to Jelinek’s site (via BoingBoing)

Author Will Shetterly has released two of his books to the public in text format under a Creative Commons license - meaning they’re free to read and share.

Cory Doctorow writes:

On Tuesday, I blogged Will Shetterly amazing new American magic-realist novel, The Gospel of the Knife — now, Will has released the whole text of the novel under a Creative Commons license!

That’s just for starters: Will has also released the full text of Dogland, the book that comes before “Gospel.” This is an incredible, magical novel about a kid whose father opens a dog theme park in Florida in the 1950s, and lands his family in the middle of the segregation fight, the wonderment and despoiling of Florida, and a centuries-old mystery. Dogland is one of my favorite novels of all time, and having it online to email to people will greatly ease my task of ensuring that as many people as possible read this and have their lives changed by it.

You can read both of the books for free on Shetterly’s Blogspot site.
Links: Dogland, Gospel of the Knife (via BoingBoing)

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

The whacky Viennese net-artists at Monochrom are planning a giant printed annual and they’re looking for your articles to include in it.

Monochrom is looking for:

…articles, essays, graphics, cartoons, cut-up stuff for the next multi-issue of our non-commercial yearbook series “monochrom”. We’ll publish the entire book in English, a fact that might be highly interesting for many monolingual Angloamerican folks.

There is no maximum or minimum length for articles or essays. There is no general topic whatsoever. You write about things you find interesting. Or boring. Your text could be about radical constructivism. Or fish and chips. Or hacking your toilet. Or blowing up Mercury. Or HTML. Or Mormon theology and Battlestar Galactica. You’ll find your topic!

Submissions deadline is September 15, 2007.

Link

Fred Saberhagen, a giant in the SF&F genres, has passed away. Here’s the obituary from Locus (via BoingBoing):

SF and fantasy writer Fred Saberhagen, born 1930, died June 29, 2007, at the age of 77. He began publishing in 1961 with short stories in Galaxy and If magazines, and published collection Berserker in 1967, first in a series about interstellar killing machines programmed to destroy all life. Saberhagen’s 60+ books also included the Empire of the East sequence, beginning with The Broken Lands (1968), the Dracula sequence, beginning with The Dracula Tape (1975), and two books co-written with Roger Zelazny, Coils (1981) and The Black Throne (1990). His last book was Ardneh’s Sword (Tor, 2006).
• The family will announce a date for a Memorial Celebration later this year. Donations would be appreciated to Doctors without Borders, Catholic Relief, SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, and John 23rd Catholic Church in Albuquerque.
» Wikipedia entry
» Official site: Berserker.com