Harry Potter Works His Magic

(CBS)  It's magic, for sure.

Across the country this weekend, youngsters lined up at bookstores to buy a 700-plus page volume that wasn't even on their summer reading lists.

And most started reading the book before they even left the store.

The latest adventure of a teen-age British wizard, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire went on sale here at midnight Saturday and already millions of copies were snatched up at stores and online, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.

"Yeah, Harry Potter rules," said one young book buyer in Los Angeles.

"I really like all them, but I think this will be the best," said a New York reader.

The latest bestseller is the fourth in a series by J.K. Rowling about the mystical world - Harry's world - of a wizard school.

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That world is set in England, where children turned out in costume to welcome the author, who arrived on a train named for the train that takes Harry to the Hogwarts School. The first three books had sold 30 million worldwide, an adventure that has been as magical for the author as for her characters.

"Magnify it as much as you like and that's where I am," said Rowling, who once was on welfare, said of her success.

The first run of 4 million books is not expected to meet the demand. Barnes & Noble alone expects to sell 860,000 by week's end, numbers that must be music to the ears of any bookstore.

"We've never seen anything like this before," said Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating.

Despite warnings that this book would be "darker" than the previous three, Eden Ross Lipson, children's book editor for The New York Times assures parents that "it is very much of a piece with the first three."

"It does signal that it's the end of a unit in the last scary 100 pages," she said, "and all sorts of things emerge that say that the next parts will be different. But it is a complete unit now."

Lipson believes as many adults as children are buying the book. She said the first printing of 3.8 million copies far outstrips a first printng of a John Grisham novel - 2.5 million - and there is no other great big book drawing adult readers this summer.

The Harry Potter frenzy has reshaped the children's book industry. For example, The New York Times is starting a children's best-sellers' list on July 23.


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