photo: A staff member at Monument Books displays a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , the final installment in the series, on Friday. The book went on sale globally on the same day.


Harry Potter fever has once again gripped readers around the world, and Vientiane is no exception, as the seventh and final book in the popular series went on sale on Saturday.

Vientiane 's Monument Books, the country's only distributor of the book, joined bookstores around the world in pre-ordering a large number of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , the latest episode in the adventure of the boy-wizard and his friends...more info

The shop opened promptly at 9am Saturday, letting in a stream of customers who had been waiting to snap up a copy.

Some had reserved a copy several days before its arrival in Vientiane , having seen an advertisement in the newspaper.

The shop has ordered about 90 copies initially, and will order more once the book becomes a sell-out, said the manager of Monument Books, Mr Jerome Bertheau.

This is likely, as staff confirmed that 50 percent of the shop's copies had already been sold.

The book was selling for about 300,000 kip (US$32) on the day of its release, and is now being sold for 340,000 kip (US$36) a copy.

While the series is world-famous and extremely popular in many countries, Monument staff admitted that about 90 percent of those buying the book were foreigners, with the remaining 10 percent Lao customers whose children were studying in international schools in Vientiane .

The author of Harry Potter, JK Rowling, published the first Harry Potter book 10 years ago, when the core audience was about eight or nine years old.

Today, the series is being sold in 93 countries; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has had a print run of 12 million in the US alone, and more than 2.2 million ordered in advance from Internet retailer Amazon, according to the BBC website.

By Viengsavanh Phengphachan
vientianetimes

(KPL) A new edition of modified Lao dictionary was just officially approved by Ministry of Education, to respond social demand after lacking an officially Lao dictionary for years.

The new Lao dictionary for 2549 B.C (Buddhist Calendar) has been published more than 10,000 copies for public use officially.

The dictionary was displayed at an exhibition for celebrating this new publishing at the Public Library at the end of April, which was the third issue, pioneered by Maha Sila Viravong... read more

This dictionary consists of 10,000 words and grammar, which was collected and composed by Maha Sila Viravong. Most of vocabularies are collected from philosophies, religious and literature and some mistakes have been adjusted and were copied from the original copy.

The special character of this book was to maintain old style spelling based on religious, Bali and Sanskrit languages.

In 1951, the Ministry of Education has appointed the Literature Committee to do a Lao dictionary to serve education work and then the Committee assigned Maha Sila Viravong to edit and collect words.
The collection of Maha Sila Viravong has been conduct till 1954 to 1959, his mission seeing that has had enough words considerably and then the first master dictionary of Laos was issued.

In order to be a reference for this dictionary since 1951, he also composed grammar consists of four chapters, which had had completed by 1961.
The new copies are now being availed at libraries for research and study and distribute for people who interested to learn Lao language.

Source: kpl.net.la