Excitement surrounds release of sixth Potter book

Bookstores all over Atlanta will be staying open late tonight in celebration of the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Most Borders, Barnes & Noble and Chapter 11 bookstores in the Atlanta area will be open past midnight, with the exception of the Barnes & Noble in Tech Square, which will close at its usual time. If you've reserved your copy there, you're out of luck until 8 a.m. tomorrow when the bookstore opens.

The website www.potterparties.com has a listing of release party locations all around the world. Eighty-five parties are currently listed for the state of Georgia, 14 of which are in Atlanta. Several others are being held in suburbs of Atlanta.

Half-Blood Prince is the sixth book in the Harry Potter series by British author J.K. Rowling. Security surrounding the delivery of the book to stores and distributors is unprecedented for any book release, employing GPS tracking on armored delivery trucks to make sure the drivers don't stop.

Boxes containing the books are printed with the words, "do not open until midnight, July 16, 2005," and warnings to bookstores by U.S. publisher Scholastic that if the books are made available before the release date that the store will no longer be allowed to carry any books published by Scholastic.

Despite all of the measures taken, a bookstore in Canada accidentally sold 15 copies of Half-Blood Prince earlier this week. The Canadian publisher of the books, Raincoast, was able to successfully file injunctions against the purchasers to keep the contents of the book a secret until the release, and has also offered incentives for the purchasers to return their books, including an autographed bookplate and a gift bag of Harry Potter merchandise.

A drugstore in Kingston, N.Y. also mistakenly put its shipment of the sixth Potter book on the shelves, where a copy was purchased by a nine-year-old boy. The copies were removed approximately an hour later and the purchased book was returned once the boy and his mother learned of the mistake.

The high-profile release of the sixth Harry Potter book has also been the center of a media frenzy, including an appearance by Jim Dale, the voice of the Harry Potter audio books in the U.S., on the Today Show on Tuesday.

NBC alluded that Dale would be reading an excerpt from Half-Blood Prince, but instead, he read a brief passage from the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Many fans at the Harry Potter fan site www.cosforums.com were incensed by what they viewed as a deliberate attempt to cash in on the release of Half-Blood Prince with a "bait and switch" trick in order to boost ratings.

The books in the Harry Potter series have topped both adult and children's bestseller lists all over the world and Half-Blood Prince has been one of Amazon's top sellers almost since it became available for presale.

The English-language edition will be released worldwide as midnight rolls around in each country. Half-Blood Prince is also the first book in history to have a Braille edition released simultaneously with the print edition.