Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows US, UK, and UK adult cover art, from left to right:

Links to larger versions:

• Large US cover
  
• Large UK cover (including back)
• Large UK adult art (including back)

The jacket text on the UK covers reads:

Harry has been burdened with a dark, dangerous and seemingly impossible task: that of locating and destroying Voldemort’s remaining Horctuxes. Never has Harry felt so alone, or faced a future so full of shadows. But Harry must somehow find within himself the strength to complete the task he has been given. He must leave the warmth, safety and companionship of The Burrow and follow without fear or hesitation the inexorable path laid out for him…

In this final, seventh instalment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to many questions that have been so eagerly awaited. The spellbinding, richly woven nerrative, which plunges, twists and turns at a breathtaking pace, confirms the author as a mistress of storytelling, whose books will be read, reread and read again.

I remember reading about their hunt for a new name in Publisher’s Weekly a while back. Well, they’ve announced it: Grand Central Publishing. From The New York Times:

”We are ‘grand’ because we are big, impressive, even magnificent at times. And the word ‘central’ reflects the fact that we recognize the huge audience of readers between New York City and the West Coast who are looking for books across a wide range of tastes,” Grand Central’s senior vice president and publisher, Jamie Raab, said Monday in a statement.

Full story is available on NYTimes.com.

Publisher Scholastic Corp. said on Wednesday it would release a record-breaking 12 million copies for the first U.S. printing of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which hits stores on July 21.

Reuters has the full story. To compare, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had a first printing of 10.8 million copies.

“7: The Mickey Mantle Novel,” Peter Golenbock’s occasionally racy account of the life of Mickey Mantle, which was canceled last month by its publisher, HarperCollins, was revived yesterday by Lyons Press.

Read the story on NYTimes.com. For some reason, it’s filed under the Sports section - Baseball, to be specific - rather than Books.

From Reuters:

The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers browse books online.

Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.

Continue reading on Reuters.co.uk. 

In front of a packed hall at the second annual ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference, ICv2 CEO Milton Griepp reported that graphic novel sales in the U.S. and Canada hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.

Griepp reported that sales of graphic novels passed comics periodicals as “the most popular format,” in 2006. He reported that 2006 sales of comics periodicals was about $310 million.

Griepp sees more growth for the category in 2007, noting plans by bestselling prose authors such as Stephen King and Laurell K. Hamilton to release comics work in the coming year. While manga continued to lead the category in sales, he noted that American genre comics were also doing well. He also said that acclaimed nonfiction titles like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the comics adaptation of the 9/11 report and Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen were attracting new readers, female readers in particular, to the category.

Link to the Publishers Weekly article

Patricia Schroeder, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said US publishers in China last year suffered an estimated 52 million dollars in losses due to piracy on the Internet.

“Visits to China and discussions with our member publishers reveal a staggering amount of book piracy plaguing this most promising of markets,” she said.

Book piracy also includes illegal commercial scale photocopying of academic materials, print piracy and unauthorized translations as well as trademark counterfeiting, Schroeder said.

Bestsellers such as the Harry Potter series, Dan Brown’s novels and political autobiographies are pirated in English and Chinese within days of their home country releases, Schroeder said.

Link to the Yahoo! News article

Based on the principles of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, the novel, called A Million Penguins, is open to anyone to join in, write and edit. None of the words, characters or plot twists will be attributed to any individual and - and this is the element of the project most likely to bruise delicate egos - participants are free to edit, chop and change other writers’ work.

“To be honest, we don’t know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out,” says Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin’s digital publisher. “We hope people will enter into it in the spirit we intend and leave their egos at the door. It’s not about individual work and individual brilliance - it’s about people working together as a community”.

Link to the Guardian article; link to the A Million Penguins wiki.