He pointed out that industry observers had questioned Scholastic’s survival after the decline of other wildly successful series from the publisher, like Goosebumps and the Baby-Sitters Club. He said that even in a record year like 2005, when sales of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” generated about $175 million in revenues, that was about 13 percent of the company’s book sales and only 8 percent of Scholastic’s total revenues, which include income from educational publishing, children’s television programming, DVDs, computer software and its international division. Rowling and her series attracts, it is not the pillar holding up the company. Richard Robinson, the company’s chairman and chief executive, is quick to emphasize that despite the outsize attention that Ms. Instead, she said, the company had a number of projects that it believed could generate a sizable chunk of revenue. “If I suggested that I had in the pipeline the one thing that is going to replace what Harry has been to the company, that would be arrogant and ill-informed,” said Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division. Scholastic officials readily admit that there is no one book or series waiting in the wings to succeed the Harry Potter books, which have 121.5 million copies in print in the United States and 325 million worldwide. When “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth in the series, was published in July 2005, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours. It is hard to imagine how the publishing industry will ever replace the sensation that spawned midnight parties and all-night lines to get the books the moment they went on sale. Rowling has hinted she may kill off one of the main characters, comes as a bittersweet finale not only for readers but also for the publishing companies, booksellers and licensees that have cashed in on the international phenomenon since it began more than nine years ago with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” Millions of fans around the world are fiercely anticipating the final installment. That will be just eight days after the release of the film version of the fifth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” promising a huge summer for fans of the young wizard. Rowling, the author of the record-setting Harry Potter books, announced yesterday that the seventh and last installment in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will be published on July 21.
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