Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - Release history

Country	Release date	Edition (Hardback/Paperback)	Publisher	Pages
Canada	1 December 1998	Hardback Children's Edition	Raincoast	223
	1 December 1998	Paperback Adult Edition (Original)
	1 November 1999	Hardback Signature Special Edition
	31 August 2000	Paperback Children's Edition
	16 October 2002	Paperback Magic Edition
	4 October 2004	Hardback Adult Edition (Re-issue with new cover)		336
	12 January 2011	Paperback Adult Edition (Re-issue with new cover)	Bloomsbury	223
	12 January 2011	Paperback Harry Potter Signature Edition
	27 August 2013	Paperback Adult Edition (Re-issue with new cover)
United Kingdom	26 June 1997	Hardback Children's Edition
	26 June 1997	Paperback Children's Edition
	11 September 1998	Paperback Adult Edition (Original)
	27 September 1999	Hardback Signature Special Edition
	8 October 2001	Paperback Special Edition
	10 July 2004	Hardback Adult Edition (Re-issue with new cover)		336
	4 October 2004	Paperback Adult Edition (Re-issue with new cover)		223
	1 November 2010	Paperback Harry Potter Signature Edition
	18 July 2013	Paperback Adult Edition (Re-issue with new cover)
United States	1 September 1998	Hardback	Arthur A. Levine/ Scholastic	309
	8 September 1999	Paperback
	1 November 2000	Hardback Collector's Edition
	1 November 2001	Mass Market Paperback		400
	September 2008	Paperback (Exclusive Scholastic School Market Edition)		309
	1 October 2008	Hardback 10th Anniversary Edition		309
	27 August 2013	Paperback (Re-issue with new cover)		336

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Uses in education and business - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Uses in education and business

Educationalists have found that children's literacy is directly related to how many words they read per year, and they read much more if they find material they like. A 2001 survey by The New York Times estimated that almost 60% of US children aged between 6 and 17 had read at least one Harry Potter book. Surveys in other countries, including India and South Africa, found that children were enthusiastic about the series. Since even the first two books are quite long, a child who has read the first four will have read over four times the number of pages in a year's worth of school reading texts. This greatly improves children's skills and their motivation to read.

Writers on education and business subjects have used the book as an object lesson. Writing about clinical teaching in medical schools, Jennifer Conn contrasted Snape's technical expertise with his intimidating behaviour towards students; on the other hand Quidditch coach Madam Hooch illustrated useful techniques in the teaching of physical skills, including breaking down complex actions into sequences of simple ones and helping students to avoid common errors. Joyce Fields wrote that the books illustrate four of the five main topics in a typical first-year sociology class: "sociological concepts including culture, society, and socialisation; stratification and social inequality; social institutions; and social theory".

Stephen Brown noted that the early Harry Potter books, especially Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, were a runaway success despite inadequate and poorly organised marketing. Brown advised marketing executives to be less preoccupied with rigorous statistical analyses and the "analysis, planning, implementation, and control" model of management. Instead he recommended that they should treat the stories as "a marketing masterclass", full of enticing products and brand names. For example, a real-world analogue of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans was introduced under licence in 2000 by toymaker Hasbro.

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Video games of Harry Potter 1

Main article: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (video game)

Video games loosely based on the book were released between 2001 and 2003, generally under the American title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Most were published by Electronic Arts but Arts but produced by different developers:

Publisher	Year	Platform	Type	Metacritic score	Notes
Electronic Arts	2001	MS Windows	Role-playing game	65%
Aspyr	2002	Mac OS 9	Role-playing game	(not available)	Same as Windows version
Electronic Arts	2001	Game Boy Color	Role-playing game	(not available)
Electronic Arts	2001	Game Boy Advance	"Adventure/puzzle" game	64%
Electronic Arts	2003	GameCube	"Action adventure"	62%
Electronic Arts	2001	PlayStation	Role-playing game	64%
Electronic Arts	2003	PlayStation 2	"Action adventure"	56%
Electronic Arts	2003	Xbox	"Action adventure"	59%

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Friday, November 28, 2014

harry potter 1 - Style and themes

Philip Nel highlighted the influence of Jane Austen, whom Rowling has greatly admired since the age of twelve. Both novelists encourage re-reading, because details that look insignificant foreshadow important events or characters much later in the story-line – for example Sirius Black is briefly mentioned near the beginning of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and then becomes a major character in the third to fifth books. Like Austen's heroines, Harry often has to re-examine his ideas near the ends of books. Some social behaviour in the Harry Potter books is remininiscent of Austen, for example the excited communal reading of letters. Both authors satirise social behaviour and give characters names that express their personalities. However in Nel's opinion Rowling's humour is more based on caricature and the names she invents are more like those found in Charles Dickens's stories, and Amanda Cockrell noted that many of these express their owners' traits through allusions that run from ancient Roman mythology to eighteenth-century German literature. Rowling, like the Narnia series' author C.S. Lewis, thinks there is no rigid distinction between stories for children and for adults. Nel also noted that, like many good writers for children, Rowling combines literary genres – fantasy, young-adult fiction, boarding school stories, Bildungsroman and many others.

Some reviewers compared Philosopher's Stone to the stories of Roald Dahl, who died in 1990. Many writers since the 1970s had been hailed as his successor, but none had attained anything near his popularity with children and, in a poll conducted shortly after the launch of Philosopher's Stone, seven of the ten most popular children's books were by Dahl, including the one in top place. The only other really popular children's author of the late 1990s was an American, R. L. Stine. Some of the story elements in Philosopher's Stone resembled parts of Dahl's stories; for example, the hero of James and the Giant Peach lost his parents and had to live with a pair of unpleasant aunts – one fat and one thin rather like Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, who treated Harry as a servant. However Harry Potter was a distinctive creation, able to take on the responsibilities of an adult while remaining a child inside.

Librarian Nancy Knapp and marketing professor Stephen Brown noted the liveliness and detail of descriptions, especially of shop scenes such as Diagon Alley. Tad Brennan commented that Rowling's writing resembles that of Homer: "rapid, plain, and direct in expression." Stephen King admired "the sort of playful details of which only British fantasists seem capable" and concluded that they worked because Rowling enjoys a quick giggle and then moves briskly forward.

Nicholas Tucker described the early Harry Potter books as looking back to Victorian and Edwardian children's stories: Hogwarts was an old-style boarding school in which the teachers addressed pupils formally by their surnames and were most concerned with the reputations of the houses with which they were associated; characters' personalities were plainly shown by their appearances, starting with the Dursleys; evil or malicious characters were to be crushed rather than reformed, including Filch's cat Mrs Norris; and the hero, a mistreated orphan who found his true place in life, was charismatic and good at sports, but considerate and protective towards the weak. Several other commentators have stated that the books present a highly stratified society including many social stereotypes. However Karin Westerman drew parallels with 1990s Britain: a class system that was breaking down but defended by those whose power and status it upheld; the multi-ethnic composition of Hogwarts' students; the racial tensions between the various intelligent species; and school bullying.

Susan Hall wrote that there is no rule of law in the books, as the actions of Ministry of Magic officials are unconstrained by laws, accountability or any kind of legal challenge. This provides an opportunity for Voldemort to offer his own horrific version of order. As a side-effect Harry and Hermione, who were brought up in the highly regulated Muggle world, find solutions by thinking in ways unfamiliar to wizards. For example Hermione notes that one obstacle to finding the Philosopher's Stone is a test of logic rather than magical power, and that most wizards have no chance of solving it.

Nel suggested that the unflattering characterisation of the extremely conventional, status-conscious, materialistic Dursleys was Rowling's reaction to the family policies of the British government in the early 1990s, which treated the married heterosexual couple as the "preferred norm", while the author was a single mother. Harry's relationships with adult and juvenile wizards are based on affection and loyalty. This is reflected in his happiness whenever he is a temporary member of the Weasley family throughout the series, and in his treatment of first Rubeus Hagrid and later Remus Lupin and Sirius Black as father-figures.

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Harry potter 1 - Translations

Main article: Harry Potter in translation

By mid-2008 official translations of the book were published in 67 languages. Bloomsbury have published translations in Latin and in Ancient Greek, and the latter was described as "one of the most important pieces of Ancient Greek prose written in many centuries".

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Thursday, November 27, 2014

harry potter 1 - U.S. publication and reception

Scholastic Corporation bought the U.S. rights at the Bologna Book Fair in April 1997 for US$105,000, an unusually high sum for a children's book. They thought that a child would not want to read a book with the word "philosopher" in the title and, after some discussion, the American edition was published in September 1998 under the title Rowling suggested, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone .Rowling claimed that she regretted this change and would have fought it if she had been in a stronger position at the time. Philip Nel has pointed out that the change lost the connection with alchemy, and the meaning of some other terms changed in translation, for example from UK English "crumpets" to US English "muffin". While Rowling accepted the change from both UK English "mum" and Seamus Finnigan's Irish variant "mam" to "mom" in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, she vetoed this change in the later books. However Nel considered that Scholastic's translations were considerably more sensitive than most of those imposed on UK English books of the time, and that some other changes could be regarded as useful copyedits.Since the UK editions of early titles in the series were published a few months earlier than the American versions, some American readers became familiar with the British English versions after buying them via the Internet.

At first the most prestigious reviewers ignored the book, leaving it to book trade and library publications such as Kirkus Reviews and Booklist, which examined it only by the entertainment-oriented criteria of children's fiction. However, more penetrating specialist reviews (such as one by Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, which pointed out the complexity, depth and consistency of the world Rowling had built) attracted the attention of reviewers in major newspapers.Although The Boston Globe and Michael Winerip in The New York Times complained that the final chapters were the weakest part of the book they and most other American reviewers gave glowing praise. A year later the US edition was selected as an American Library Association Notable Book, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, and a New York Public Library 1998 Best Book of the Year, and won Parenting Magazine's Book of the Year Award for 1998, the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults.

In August 1999 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone topped the New York Times list of best-selling fiction, and stayed near the top of the list for much of 1999 and 2000, until the New York Times split its list into children's and adult sections under pressure from other publishers who were eager to see their books given higher placings. Publishers Weekly's report in December 2001 on cumulative sales of children's fiction placed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 19th among hardbacks (over 5 million copies) and 7th among paperbacks (over 6.6 million copies).

In May 2008, Scholastic announced the creation of a 10th Anniversary Edition of the book that was released on 1 October 2008 to mark the tenth anniversary of the original American release.[41] For the fifteenth anniversary of the books, Scholastic re-released Sorcerer's Stone, along with the other six novels in the series, with new cover art by Kazu Kibuishi in 2013.