Neil Blair

Retailers have welcomed the "huge news" J K Rowling is to publish with Little, Brown, with one predicting it will top print and e-book charts. However, an independent bookseller voiced concerns that larger chains and supermarkets may slash its price in order to claim the greatest market share, but added the book's release "can only be a good thing for bookselling". Rival publishers privately expressed shock that they had not been offered the book. Rowling's agent Neil Blair told The Bookseller: "We didn't auction."

Little, Brown Book Group and Little, Brown and Company are delighted to announce that they will publish J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults worldwide in the English language, both in print and ebooks.

"[Pottermore] is a hugely exciting project, says former HarperCollins exec and incoming Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne, "which will take one of the greatest brands in literature into a digital future."

E-books could very well be the way of the future for book publishers, but for the author of the expected biggest release of the year, readers are going to have to finish out J.K. Rowling’s series the old fashioned way. Along with releasing the July 21 street date for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” representatives of the author said the book, like the six previous editions in the series, would not be made available to readers as an e-book. Neil Blair, a lawyer with Rowling’s literary firm Christopher Little Literary Agency, told the Associated Press that the author has no intentions of making the