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A magical day for Harry Potter fans'Half-Blood Prince' flies off shelves at a supernatural speed
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YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- Now it's time to start reading. Harry Potter mania emerged yet again at midnight, with eager fans in Great Britain, the United States, Canada and other lands filling bookstores for the Saturday launch of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the latest in J.K. Rowling's chronicle of the boy wizard. "I can't believe that I have the first copy," 20-year-old Rachel Grandy -- who had waited in line at New York's Union Square Barnes & Noble for 16 hours -- told The Associated Press. "It's totally boggling my mind right now." "I'm not getting any sleep tonight," a giddy, witch-hat-topped girl told CNN in London, England, as she clutched her copy of "Prince." "I'll be reading all night." Isabel Sen, a Potter fan who appeared on CNN Saturday morning from New York, was already up to Chapter Five after buying her book at a midnight opening. She and her sister Emily would have stayed up all night to read it except for her father, she said. "We tried [to keep reading]," she said, "but we had [the book] forcibly taken from us." Saturday the yeoman's work will be done by postal and overnight package services, which will deliver more than 2 million "Prince" pre-orders to customers all over the world. Moreover, bookstores may sell 10 million copies in the first 24 hours, according to an estimate by the British bookstore chain Waterstone's. But fair warning: The new book, the sixth in the planned seven-book series, is the darkest yet. Early reviews, by selected reviewers fortunate enough to receive a rare advance copy, have noted the death of an important character and a general tone of foreboding. The book has "a thoroughly harrowing denouement that sees the death of yet another important person in Harry's life, and that renders this, the sixth volume of the series, the darkest and most unsettling installment yet," wrote New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani in Saturday's editions. "You get a lot of answers in this book," Rowling, a resident of Edinburgh, Scotland, said as she arrived at Edinburgh Castle for a special midnight reading before thousands of adoring fans. (See story.) "I can't wait for everyone to read it." Isabel Sen was already enraptured -- and a little nervous. "I've only read four chapters and I'm already shocked," she said. Amazing numbersScholastic, the book's American publisher, is printing a record 10.8 million copies of "Prince." That dwarfs the previous record of 8.5 million copies boasted by the book's predecessor, 2003's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." The book has sat in the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com's best seller list since it was announced late last year. "Prince" has worldwide pre-orders of more than 2 million copies, 1.4 million from Amazon alone. Half of those are in the United States, so many that the United Parcel Service and the U.S. Postal Service are teaming up to deliver them all. As with past Harry Potter releases, a few slipped out early: 14 in Vancouver, British Columbia; one in upstate New York; and two, allegedly, in Indianapolis, Indiana. A digital image of an alleged page from the book -- one revealing a character's death -- has been making the rounds of e-mail. Security was extremely tight, with booksellers selling "Prince" before Saturday in their respective time zones facing the wrath of Rowling's publishers, if not the publishers' attorneys. "There is a huge amount of security around the book right up to the moment the clock strikes midnight," Richard Cristofoli, an executive at British bookseller W.H. Smith, told Reuters last week. In London, security precautions extended to the bookstores themselves in the wake of the July 7 terrorist bombings that shook the city. W.H. Smith canceled a planned midnight launch at King's Cross Station, the site of the deadliest of the terrorist attacks. King's Cross is the home of Platform 9 3/4, the traditional departure point for Harry and his friends as they take the train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at the beginning of each term. However, bookstore operators wanted to make clear that it was "business as usual," in the words of John Webb, a children's buyer at Waterstone's. "London's open for business and we want to celebrate this book," Webb told the AP. The chain reported 300,000 people attended midnight openings at more than 100 stores across Britain. British bookstores also used the book as an excuse for an old-fashioned price war. Many bookstores are selling the book for about half its £16.99 (about $29.75) cover price; Amazon's UK affiliate, for example, was offering it for £8.99 ($15.75). (The U.S. cover price is $29.99.) Excitement "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is darker than its predecessors, say reviewers. U.S. bookstores had a festive atmosphere. In New York, the Barnes & Noble Union Square location used a person dressed as an owl -- the preferred messenger in Rowling's books -- to hand over the first box of books to cashiers. In Beaverton, Oregon, a Powell's bookstore offered fire walkers. Books 'N' More in Wilmington, Ohio, featured horses dressed up as unicorns parading down the main street, and everywhere bookstore workers (and customers) came as Harry, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, instructor Severus Snape, groundskeeper Hagrid and other Potter characters. "What's not to like?" 14-year-old Emily Smith, waiting at the Norcross, Georgia, Barnes & Noble store, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I love fantasy books. I love magic and dragons." "Prince" is the second-to-last novel in the Potter series. Its serialization has helped the book's popularity, says Philip Nel, who teaches a Harry Potter course at Kansas State University. "This is a very long mystery novel we are getting in installments," he told USA Today. "Each book ends with some suspense. You want to know what happens next." "There's nothing quite like Harry Potter in publishing," Bookseller magazine children's book expert Caroline Horn told Reuters. Now that the wait for Book Six is over, Potter fans are ready to bury their noses in their copies. They're confident they're going to get a good story. "If you can write five goods books in a row, you can write six good books in a row," 10-year-old William Hilkert told the AP. The Harry Potter movies have been made by Warner Bros. The studio, like CNN, is a division of Time Warner. Copyright 2005 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report. 
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