A ‘Christmas at Hogwarts’ E-Book Is Coming to Public Libraries This Fall Through Hoopla
Harry’s very first Christmas at Hogwarts is coming back in a brand-new form this year — and you will be able to borrow it for free. Hoopla Digital and Pottermore Publishing have announced a new interactive ebook edition of Christmas at Hogwarts arriving at participating public libraries this fall.
This is not the hardcover already sitting on many fans’ shelves. The new release is an iconographic edition built for screens, pairing professional narration and sound design with gentle animated movement across the illustrations to turn the picture book into a read-along. It is aimed squarely at younger readers and families — the kind of cozy, follow-along story made for a bedtime, a classroom, or a December reread by the fire.
The story will be familiar to anyone who knows the books. It draws on the Christmas sequence from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, complete with a snow-blanketed castle, crackers in the Great Hall, and Harry unwrapping his first real holiday gift. Pottermore’s Managing Director, Jennie McCann, said the team hopes it helps younger audiences “discover the magic of Harry Potter’s first Christmas at Hogwarts.”
Here is the part library lovers will like best: Hoopla’s whole appeal is instant borrowing, with no holds and no waiting for another reader to return a title. Once the edition goes live, any patron of a participating library can borrow it right away with a valid card, through the Hoopla app on Android or iOS or at hoopladigital.com. Hoopla serves more than 10,000 libraries across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and this edition will be exclusive to its platform rather than sold in shops.
Prefer to own a copy you can keep instead? The story it’s built on is already a hardcover you can buy. The illustrated edition of Christmas at Hogwarts — J.K. Rowling’s text from Sorcerer’s Stone with artwork by Ziyi Gao — arrived in 2024 from Scholastic in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK, a 48-page hardcover keepsake made to sit under the tree. We grabbed our copy the week it landed:
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It is the latest chapter in a growing partnership. In 2024, Hoopla and Pottermore brought Stephen Fry’s original UK Harry Potter audiobook recordings to libraries across the US and Canada for the first time, and demand for Wizarding World titles on the service remains high — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ranked as Hoopla’s fifth most popular ebook and audiobook in 2025.
One honest caveat: there is no exact release date yet beyond this fall, and the two companies are expected to share more at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Chicago, running June 25–29. We will update this post once a firm date is set.
The timing could hardly be sweeter. This lands the same Christmas that HBO’s new Harry Potter series premieres, which means this December fans will have two fresh ways to return to Harry’s first holiday at Hogwarts.
Will you be borrowing Christmas at Hogwarts when it reaches your library? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to follow for more Harry Potter news.
Source: Business Wire
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