Bloomsbury is releasing a new boxed set: Harry Potter: The magical adventure begins . . . Volumes 1-3 on October 10th for £21 (it is £18.90 on Bloomsbury’s website.) It looks like they are brand new covers, but the actual covers have not been released as of this moment. Don’t forget about the new adult editions of the books that are available in the UK as of today!

They describe the set as:

Every great story has a great beginning – and this is where Harry Potter’s extraordinary, magical adventure starts. From the moment Harry Potter is deposited on the doorstep of number four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, with a swish of Albus Dumbledore’s cloak and the words ‘Good luck, Harry’, J.K. Rowling’s irresistible storytelling magic pulls readers into an unforgettable adventure. Harry Potter is a milestone in every child’s reading life and this gorgeous, collectable boxed set is the perfect introduction for new readers, wizard and Muggle alike.

Contains Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. These new paperback editions are exclusively available in this boxed set.

Thanks to SS for the tip!

J.K. Rowling has updated her official website to comment on how she was ousted as the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  For fans who are unaware, news broke over the weekend that she published the book back in April under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Since that time the book has sold out in most online stores and there are long wait lists at libraries. The book has been spotted on eBay already for over $300!  Yesterday I purchased the book on half.com for just under $20, but now the cheapest one on there is $26, followed by $60.  The publishing companies are issuing reprint of the book which will carry a revised author biography, which reads ‘Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling. So try to get a first edition because they are sure to be rare in the future!

“I hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience! It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback from publishers and readers under a different name. The upside of being rumbled is that I can publicly thank my editor David Shelley, who has been a true partner in crime, all those people at Little, Brown who have been working so hard on The Cuckoo’s Calling without realising that I wrote it, and the writers and reviewers, both in the newspapers and online, who have been so generous to the novel.  And to those who have asked for a sequel, Robert fully intends to keep writing the series, although he will probably continue to turn down personal appearances.”

The Sunday Times is reporting that back in April, J.K. Rowling published a new novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. Thanks to The New York Times, those of us without Sunday Times subscriptions can hear the story.  According to the article Rowling said:  “I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience,” she said in a statement. “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”

The books description, from Amazon, states:

A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel’s suicide.
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.

The story of the unmasking of Rowling is as follows:

The story of how The Sunday Times uncovered the truth is an odd one that involves, as seems so often the case these days, Twitter. It started on Thursday, said Richard Brooks, the paper’s arts editor, after one of his colleagues happened to post a tweet mentioning that she had loved “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” and that it did not seem as if the book had been written by a novice.

“After midnight she got a tweet back from an anonymous person saying it’s not a first-time novel — it was written by J. K. Rowling,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “So my colleague tweeted back and said, ‘How do you know for sure?’  ” The person replied, “I just know,” and then proceeded to delete all his (or her) tweets and to close down the Twitter account, Mr. Brooks said. “All traces of this person had been taken off, and we couldn’t find his name again.”

[…]

First he did some Internet detective work, finding many similarities between “The Casual Vacancy” and “The Cuckoo’s Calling.” Both books shared the same agent, publisher and editor in Britain, for example. It seemed particularly odd, he said, that the editor, David Shelley, would be in charge of both someone as important as J. K. Rowling — a very big job, indeed — and someone as seemingly unimportant as Robert Galbraith.

He then started reading the book. “I said, ‘Nobody who was in the Army and now works in civilian security could write a book as good as this,’ ” he said. Next, he sent copies of “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” “The Casual Vacancy” and the last Harry Potter novel, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” to a pair of computer linguistic experts, who found significant similarities among them.

[…]

“I [Mr Brooks] e-mailed a blunt question: ‘I believe that Robert Galbraith is in fact J. K. Rowling, and will you please come back with a straightforward answer?’ ” he related. On Saturday morning, he said he received a response from a Rowling spokeswoman, who said that she had “decided to ’fess up.’ ”

Ms. Rowling now stands to make a lot of money from this new book, and so do the publishers. One interesting aspect of the whole story is how Little, Brown essentially colluded in keeping a secret that caused it, at least until now, to forgo possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

In a short statement released on Sunday, Reagan Arthur, Little, Brown’s publisher, said that the company was “pleased and proud” of “The Cuckoo’s Calling.” “A reprint of the book is under way and will carry a revised author biography, which reads ‘Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling,’ ” she said. The company said it planned to publish a second book in what looks set to be a series by Mr. Galbraith, a k a Ms. Rowling, next summer.

Scholastic has released the cover for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix today via their website. They stated in a press release that fans found the cover on the scholastic website:

“Devoted Harry Potter fans scour the web every day for any news about the series, and we were happy to have them discover and reveal the fifth new cover by the talented Kazu Kibuishi,” said Stacy Lellos, VP, Marketing, Scholastic Trade Publishing. “With the reveal for the first book on Good Morning America, the second third and fourth book covers at Book Expo America, the LeakyCon convention and the American Library Association convention respectively, it took no time for fans to catch the fifth cover right on the Scholastic website. We have two more fun reveals planned in the coming month.”

The complete series of new books and a new boxed set from Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, will be available on August 27, 2013, as part of the 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, published in September 1998.

In a continuation from all the awesome new book cover news the past couple of days, Scholastic has revealed the cover for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! As a quick recap, the covers were designed by Kazu Kibuishi and 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. It will be released as a boxed set or individual books, will offer new readers just reaching the age to begin the series a glimpse of J.K. Rowling’s magical world and the epic story they are about to enter.

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.