Scholastic has issued a press release on the new cover for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  The cover was released at the LeakyCon opening ceremonies and Scholastic has now released it for the public.  The image may be seen in high resolution in the gallery!  The boxed set (as well as individual books) will be available from August 27th.

Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today unveiled the new cover for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – the third of seven new trade paperback editions illustrated by New York Times bestselling author and illustrator, Kazu Kibuishi. Cheryl Klein, Executive Editor of Arthur A. Levine Books, unveiled the new cover in Portland, Oregon, at the fourth annual LeakyCon Convention, an event that grew out of the worldwide Harry Potter fan community. The complete series of new books and a new boxed set will be available on August 27, 2013, as part of Scholastic’s celebration of the 15th anniversary of the U.S. publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the original book in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter series.

In each of the new cover illustrations, Kibuishi perfectly captures a pivotal moment from that particular book. For Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban, he brings in more of the mystery and darkness of the series than he did the first two titles and depicts Harry conjuring his patronus to ward off the life-sucking dementors. Fifteen years after the first U.S. publication of J.K. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in September 1998, there are more than 150 million Harry Potter books in print in the United States alone and the series still hits bestseller lists regularly. The seven Harry Potter books are published in over 200 territories in 73 languages and have sold more than 450 million copies worldwide.