The latest magical tome by J.K. Rowling has started to fly off bookstore shelves.
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" is to be launched on Thursday for 200 school children at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, where Rowling lives.
Rowling is donating royalties from the book to a charity, which hopes it will raise millions to help vulnerable children.
Booksellers hope the collection of five tale mentioned in Rowling's chronicle about boy wizard Harry Potter will give them a merry boost.
Booksellers expect it to come straight in at No. 1 and is very likely to be No. 1 book this Christmas. It even has a chance of being the best-selling book of the year though there are only a few weeks to go.
Beedle the Bard will be published on Thursday in more than 20 countries, with a global print run of almost 8 million.
Children's High Level Group, the charity she co-founded to support institutionalized children in Eastern Europe will be the author’s beneficiary. The book is published on behalf of the charity by Harry Potter's traditional publishers Scholastic in North America and Bloomsbury elsewhere.
Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have sold more than 400 million copies and been translated into 67 languages, wrote the Beedle tales after finishing "Deathly Hallows" last year.
One of the stories, "The Tale Of The Three Brothers," is recounted in "Deathly Hallows," in which the storybook helps Harry and his friends defeat evil Lord Voldemort.
Rowling has described "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" as a refinement of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, calling it her goodbye to a world she lived in for 17 years.
The book was initially produced last year in an edition of seven handwritten copies. Six were given away by Rowling as gifts, and one was bought by Internet retailer Amazon at an auction for almost 2 million pounds ($3 million).
Amazon is printing 100,000 copies of a leather-bound collectors' edition priced at 50 pounds, or $100 in the United States.
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