The webcast of the interview with Rowling by Stephen Fry at the Albert Hall can bee seen here until July 3. There are some spoilers, including the identity of the person who dies, so don't watch it if you haven't read the book!
The Associated Press has a detailed story on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix's record-breaking sales. It's available here.
CBBC Newround -- A group of young Potter fans got the surprise of their lives when JK Rowling herself turned up to their local bookshop.
The primary school kids thought they were waiting for a member of staff to give them a book reading, and were told to count down the last 20 seconds before midnight.
And then, as if by magic, the Harry Potter author appeared too!
JK had with her a huge wooden chest full of copies of Order of the Phoenix which she signed for the children.
An American newspaper is being sued for a reported $100m after allegedly publishing a sneak preview of the eagerly-awaited new Harry Potter book.
Author J.K. Rowling and her US publishers have filed a lawsuit against the Daily News in New York after it apparently published unauthorised extracts of the book.
The paper is said to have printed two pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - which is supposed to be one of the most closely guarded secrets of the literary world.
Reports said The News printed a story saying it had a "brief glimpse into the 870 action-packed pages".
It added: "If you don't want to know anything about how Harry and his pals spend their fifth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, stop now and buy the book when it's officially released Saturday."
An accompanying graphic reportedly displayed, with readable text, what is said to be two of the novel's pages.
The News' website declared "Holy Hogwarts!", adding: "Hocus-Pocus! We've got Harry".
The website said that one of the News' reporters bought the book in a health food store in the New York borough Brooklyn.
It said the shop's owner, who it did not name, keeps a small book section and began selling the book after getting a delivery from a wholesaler.
The owner told the News he had not been told he should not sell them until 00.01 on Saturday, the website said.
US publishers Scholastic and Ms Rowling filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York.
The lawsuit "seeks damages in the tens of millions of dollars" for claims including copyright infringement.
Associated Press reported the lawsuit was for $100m - about £60m.
Other reports said that Ms Rowling's lawyers claim that as the article could be seen in Britain through the internet, it had broken an injunction banning any unauthorised advance publication of the book in the UK.
JK Rowling has revealed that she cried as she killed off a key character in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
It has been widely reported that Rowling's husband, Neil Murray, came home to find her in tears as she wrote the scene.
"I had re-written the death, re-written it and that was it. And the person was definitely dead," she told Newsnight.
Rowling said her husband, who does not know the identity of the character, suggested she should not kill the character off, if it made her so upset.
She responded by telling Murray "it doesn't work like that", and that, when writing children's books, "you need to be a ruthless killer".
(Source: Agence France-Presse and news.com.au).
Most interesting to me is the fact that she referred to the dead "person". Does this rule out characters such as Hagrid (half giant) and Lupin (werewolf)?
Thousands of copies of the new Harry Potter book worth around £130,000 have been stolen.
A trailer containing 7,680 copies of the much-anticipated Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix was taken from a trading estate in Merseyside, England, on Sunday night.
The trailer was discovered on Monday in Salford, Greater Manchester, without its load.
A spokesman for Merseyside Police said: "The trailer contained about £130,000 worth of the new Harry Potter book. We are not sure about the intended destination at this stage."
The Scotsman has published the first part of a biography of J.K. Rowling today.
HARRY Potter fans can speculate on the fifth adventure in the series by betting on which character will die in the latest book. Author JK Rowling has suggested in interviews that Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix contains the demise of one of the key players.
With the plot still a secret, the Scottish bookmaker Blue Square is taking bets on which character will not make it to the sixth novel. Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundsman played in the films by Robbie Coltrane, is favourite to come to a sticky end, at odds of 7/2. He is followed by Sirius Black at 4/1 and Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore at 5/1. Hermione Grangers life seems safe, with odds against her dying at 14/1.
A clip from Jim Dale's reading of HP & The Order Of The Phoenix has been published on the website of bookseller Amazon. For legal reasons, a transcript cannot be published. It contains some intriguing spoilers, so don't look if you don't want to know! The audio clip can be heard on Amazon's website.
Harry Potter fans have another chance to bid for a signed copy of the latest, unreleased Harry Potter adventure on the Internet after an earlier sale of the volume fell through.
The charity Sense said it is offering the copy of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," signed by author J.K. Rowling, on auction site ebay. The sale runs until June 20, the day before the book's publication.
From The Leaky Cauldron.org
(The Wall Street Journal) The recorded book lasts 26 hours and 30 minutes -- the sports equivalent of attending more than nine Major League Baseball games.
The tale of the teenage wizard occupies 17 cassette tapes and 23 compact discs. Jim Dale, who narrated the four earlier Harry Potter audiobooks, takes on the personas of 134 different characters this time around.
Security for the new title is extremely tight. David Naggar, president of Random House Diversified Publishing Group, which includes audiobooks, says that every employee at the manufacturing plant has to pass through a system that detects CDs and cassettes. In addition, the finished audiobooks are held in locked cages overseen by a security guard. Every employee working in the assembly area must wear a special badge, and all have to sign affidavits. "It's as tight as airport security," he says.
Outside the U.S., many Harry fans will have to wait months to obtain an audiobook version of "Phoenix." In Britain, the audiobook will be issued Sept. 22 by BBC Worldwide, the commercial unit of British Broadcasting Corp., through the Cover to Cover Ltd. imprint of BBC Audiobooks. The voices are all supplied by actor and author Stephen Fry, who also did the previous Harry titles for BBC Worldwide.
In the Netherlands, the audiobook is expected to come out in November, about the same time as the Dutch version of the book. All the voices will be handled by Jan Meng, the voice of many other children's books. Because the English language is more precise than Dutch, he says, many Dutch translations are 20% longer than the English original, so he expects the Dutch audiobook of Harry to run around 30 hours. "It's a lot of work," he says, "but I'm now doing Tolkien, which is 1,700 pages, so everything after that will be easy."
Eileen Hutton, president of the Audio Publishers Association, says travel-industry forecasts indicate there could be a strong bump in domestic U.S. car trips this summer, which in turn will likely boost Harry Potter sales. "It cuts down on the are-we-there-yet factor," she says.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Think you've seen a lot of hype about "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"? Just wait until the book comes out.
Billboards. Baseball parks. A countdown in Times Square. Scholastic, Inc., the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling's mega-selling children's series, has planned a $3 million-$4 million marketing campaign, more than doubling its budget for the release of the last Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," in 2000.
"I can't think of anything that compares to the budget for the new Harry Potter book, except for the budget for the last Potter story," says Laurie Brown, a vice president for sales at Harcourt Trade Publishers who over the past 20 years has also worked for Random House and Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Timed to the midnight June 21 release of "Order of the Phoenix," the show gets rolling on what could be called "Harry Potter Eve," Friday night June 20, with a countdown in Times Square. A billboard on Sunset Strip will announce the news in Los Angeles
(CBS) The publishing business is on a roll lately. But it could be doing about seven billion dollars a year better if it wasn't being robbed blind by pirate book sellers.
Pirate buster Ian Taylor told CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips that author J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter books are some of the most frequently pirated in the world.
It's Taylor's job to find the crooks already waiting across the globe to steal the next Harry Potter book, set for release later this month, and many others, and flog the pirated versions from Bangkok to Brooklyn to Beijing.
LONDON (Reuters) - Children around the world are to join an audience with JK Rowling this month and ask the author everything they long to know about Harry Potter.
To mark the release of the most eagerly awaited children's book of the year, Rowling is taking to the stage of London's Royal Albert Hall on June 26 to read from ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'' and answer questions from fans.
Following global webcasts of Madonna and Paul McCartney concerts, Microsoft's internet arm MSN is arranging a live Internet feed of the event at www.msn.co.uk/harrypotter from 11 a.m. EDT on the day.
The webcast has the potential to reach readers in 34 countries and children from around the globe have been invited to pose questions to Rowling on the show.
From the BBC News:
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has given an interview to Jeremy Paxman in a UK broadcast exclusive for the BBC. The interview, which is being produced by the Newsnight team, will be broadcast on 19 June, ahead of the publication of the long-awaited fifth Potter novel on 21 June.
Rowling tells Paxman about Order of the Phoenix, gives him a taster from the new book, and provides an insight into the inspiration behind the novels.
She also discusses the impact her much-loved books have had on children's literature.
Paxman said: "She talks honestly about her fame, her wealth and the time she even considered breaking her arm to avoid the pressures of writing.
"As well as dropping some clues about what will happen in the Order of the Phoenix, she raises intriguing new possibilities about Harry's longer term future.
"We've been trying for 18 months to get an interview with JK Rowling - I think it was worth the wait."
From CBBC:
It's looking likely the next Harry Potter flicks won't be filmed in the Scottish Highlands because of the weather and midges. The rain's been so bad, shooting of the Prisoner of Azkaban in Glencoe is at least two weeks behind schedule, says the Express newspaper.
And as well as the rain, the cast and crew have been scratching themselves silly because of the infamous midges. The mini-flies are well-known in Scotland and not even the most powerful spell seems to be able to stop the swarms which really bite.
Three weeks of heavy rain has made the ground of the set, built on a mountainside, so slippery it's dangerous to use parts of it. Dan, Rupert, Emma and Hagrid were to be taken up there by a special mountain car, but it's too wet even for that.
The newspaper says the film makers have had to take apart a huge part of the set - Hogwarts Bridge - and rebuild it in an indoor studio back in England. The annoying thing is, while the mountainside set - which includes Hagrid's hut - was being built the weather was perfect!
According to the Boston Globe, John Williams has signed on to write the score for Prisoner of Azkaban. Williams supervised the music for the first two movies, but for ''Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'' he is actually writing it.
Adam Orton, a 15-year-old boy raised £1,000 for charity auctioning signed Harry Potter books on E-bay. He is donating the proceeds to the Children's Liver Disease Foundation (CLDF), a small research charity which offers emotional support to families who have children with liver disease, a condition that Adam has lived with for many years.
Catherine Arkley, CLDF chief executive, said that they "cannot thank him enough for the inspiration and courage he shows."
The Saturday Star yesterday announced that Joanne Rowling will be in Cape Town, South Africa on 21st June to mark the launch of The Order of The Phoenix. Bookshops will be staying open all night as the book will go on sale at 1am.
It isn't yet known whether Rowling will attend any of the planned bookstore parties.