From Pop Sugar:
Remember when the Harry Potter books first came out and you lined up at midnight to get your hands on them? Well, Barnes and Noble is throwing it back to the good old days with an epic party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States.
The bookseller is hosting a Harry Potter Book Night in different locations across the country, where you will be able to take part in a Sorting Ceremony to figure out your Hogwarts house.
Link to the rest at Pop Sugar and thanks to Dave for the tip.
Even though it was Scholastic that benefited, the HP books are a kind of high-water mark for traditional paper-based publishing. They were events, I recall stopping in and getting my copy of Deathly Hallows from my local B&N on the morning of the day it came out. They had stacks and stacks and like the precursors, it was one of those books that everybody read. BP and B&N miss that, they miss that so so bad.
The HP books are still on Amazon Charts ‘most read’ list, week after week, and we know that list represents what people are actually opening on their devices, not just what somebody somewhere wishes people would read. They do not generally show up on the ‘most sold’ list though, even though that list tracks both digital and paper sales.
I suspect that many of the reads are similar to mine. The last time I read the series I got it digitally from my local library, even though a few of the books are still floating around the house somewhere. My library has licensed multiple copies of all the books, yet they are always on hold.
The B&N closed long ago.
20 years. How time flies.
Circling the drain.
So they’re doing so badly they’re passing the hat?
Maybe they should hat the head office and see if the hat can find one with ‘any clue on running their business’ in them …