Best Leisure Time Blog

posted by Adam Johns on Jan 10

Billionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling would feel “exploited” if a fan’s unofficial encyclopedic companion to the boy wizard series was published, she said in court papers made public on Thursday.

Steve Vander Ark has written “The Harry Potter Lexicon” — a 400-page reference book based on his popular fan Web site (www.hp-lexicon.org). Rowling and Warner Bros. are suing RDR Books, which planned to publish the book last November.

“I am very frustrated that a former fan has tried to co-opt my work for financial gain,” Rowling, 42, who wrote the seven hugely successful Harry Potter novels, said in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court this week.

“I believe that RDR’s book constitutes a Harry Potter ‘rip off’ of the type I have spent years trying to prevent, and that both I, as the creator of this world, and fans of Harry Potter, would be exploited by its publication,” she said.

The lawsuit filed in October names RDR Books, an independent publisher based in Michigan, and unidentified persons as defendants. It seeks to stop publication and requests damages for copyright and federal trademark infringement and any profits to be gained.

Rowling has said she plans to write her own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia, which would include material that did not make it into the novels, and donate the proceeds to charity. The novels have sold more than 400 million copies.

“I feel intensely protective, firstly, of the literary world I spent so long creating, and secondly, of the fans who bought my books in such large numbers,” said the British writer ranked by Forbes as the world’s 48th most powerful celebrity.

RDR Books has said Vander Ark, a librarian, had spoken at Harry Potter academic conferences in Britain, Canada and the United States and that a timeline he created was used by Warner Bros. in DVD releases of the Harry Potter films.

The company and Vander Ark have said the book would only promote the sale of Rowling’s work and that Vander Ark’s Web site, used by 25 million visitors, had been called “a great site” by Rowling herself.

Warner Bros is a unit of Time Warner Inc, which owns the copyright and trademark rights to the Harry Potter books.

Source: Reuters

posted by Adam Johns on Dec 21

Brandon Sanderson, author of the fantasy “Mistborn” series, will finish Robert Jordan’s final novel.

Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney Jr., died from a blood disease in September in South Carolina. He was working on the 12th book in his “Wheel of Time” fantasy series at the time of his death.

More than 44 million books in the “Wheel of Time” series have been sold worldwide, according to publisher Tor Books. The final book is titled “A Memory of Light.”

“To me, Robert Jordan is still kind of a mythological figure,” Sanderson told the Daily Herald of Provo. “I would have done this with no credit and no payment, to be perfectly honest.”

Sanderson, whose first novel, “Elantris,” was published in 2005, has four books in print.

Jordan’s widow and the book’s editor, Harriet Popham Rigney, said she was “absolutely delighted” that Sanderson agreed to finish it.

“He left copious notes and hours of audio recordings,” Rigney said in a statement on Tor Books’ Web site.

Jordan’s books tells of Rand al’Thor, who is destined to become the champion who will battle ultimate evil in a mythical land. The first title in the series, “The Eye of the World,” was published in 1990.

Source: CNN

posted by Adam Johns on Dec 14

LONDON, England (AP) — A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for nearly $4 million at auction Thursday.

The buyer, London art agent Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, now has one of only seven copies of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” which is leather bound with silver mounts.

The book originally had been expected to sell for about $100,000. The standing-room-only crowd at Sotheby’s auction house applauded as bidding topped the £1 million ($2 million) mark.

The money will benefit The Children’s Voice, a charity co-founded in 2005 by Rowling and Baroness Nicholson, a member of Britain’s House of Lords.

Rowling, 42, watched the auction on the Web from her home in Edinburgh, Scotland, and said she was ecstatic.

“This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help,” she said in a statement. “It means Christmas has come early to me.”

Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have sold nearly 400 million copies and been translated into 64 languages, wrote the Beedle tales after finishing the seventh and final work in the Potter series.

“‘The Tales of Beedle the Bard’ is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years,” Rowling said.

She said the six other copies of the Beedle books have been given to people who were closely connected to the Harry Potter collection.

The information is taken from: CNN