When Harry Met Bezos

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Your kid may be a huge Harry Potter fan, but he's got nothing on Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN). The online retailer may be the biggest cheerleader for the literary world's popular young wizard, announcing that it had racked up 560,000 orders for the sixth book that is due out July 16.

With stateside publisher Scholastic (Nasdaq: SCHL) announcing that it would be printing a record 10.8 million copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in its initial run, Amazon looks like it will be good for -- at least -- 5% of those hardcover books.

The key phrase there is "at least" because we still have another month to go. The company also broke out a perpetually updated Harry Potter meter to tally the sales. As of noon today, the orders had crept up to nearly 568,000.

Why is Amazon becoming such a popular place to buy the new book? Well, back in April, Amazon announced that that it would be teaming up with UPS (NYSE: UPS) and the United States Postal Service to deliver "hundreds of thousands" of books on the same day it would hit bookstores everywhere.

With the books marked down to $17.99 and with the convenience of same-day gratification, that's certainly good news for Amazon. Sure, the book will still be a hot seller everywhere else. However, Amazon's market-share-munching ways may mean bad news for traditional retailers such as Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) or Borders (NYSE: BGP) that have also been counting on J.K. Rowling's eagerly anticipated book to save the summer.

Amazon, an early Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation, is also going all out with Harry Potter right now. It is even launching a panel of kid reviewers. Children are invited to submit video applications online. From there, Amazon will select the winning entries and showcase what those young readers think of the new book.

With the hype machine going at full throttle, could this be the most important book release in online retailing history? That may seem like a bit of stretch, but it's hard to argue otherwise. Half-blood prince or not, Amazon's looking like its ready to be crowned as the King of Pottermania.

Some other Harry ordeals:

• Amazon teamed up with UPS and the US Postal Service to assure that its orders will arrive at hundreds of thousands of homes on July 16.
• B&N and Borders are hoping for it to be raining Harry next month, too.
• See what other stocks are being singled out in Motley Fool Stock Advisor.
• Talk about Amazon in our active Amazon.com discussion board.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has been a satisfied Amazon.com customer since the 1990s. However, he does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.