Beedle the Charitable Bard

Beedle the Bard standard edition, originally uploaded by jennysweedler.

It's only appropriate that the front cover to JK Rowling's new Tales of Beedle the Bard sports an axe and tree stump, cuz there must have been about a million trees cut down just to make the copies stacked up in the Union Square Barnes & Noble.

Still, I'm not writing this post because I've gone on a sustain-a-frenzy. The story that interests me more is the tie-in with Rowling's charity, the Children's High Level Group. The sale of a handwritten version of the book has already raised $4 million for the charity, and now Scholastic is donating to CHLG the "net proceeds" of Beedle's mass market edition.

Yes, it's a good thing--I'm not questioning that. But I also wonder if there wasn't an equally good argument for allocating some of those proceeds to Scholastic itself. After all, the publisher is in the education business, and between the financial crisis and the end of the main Harry Potter series, the company is facing substantial losses.