Recession-hit booksellers are hoping for a magical boost from a new book by Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of five fables mentioned in Rowling's saga about the boy wizard, is being published around the world on Thursday with only a fraction of the carnival-like fanfare that greeted the Potter novels.

But expectations are high for the new book, which has a global print run of eight million copies.

"We expect it will crash straight in at No.1 in our book charts," Jon Howells, of Britain's Waterstone's book store chain, said on Wednesday. "It would take a battle of magical proportions to dislodge it before Christmas."

The book's print run sounds enormous until you compare it with the Potter books. The final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold eight million copies in its first 24 hours and had a print run of 12 million in the US alone.

Retailers are not expecting the new book to generate the frenzy that accompanied publication of Deathly Hallows in July 2007, when fans dressed as witches and warlocks formed festive crowds outside book stores around the world.

But the day before publication, Beedle the Bard was ranked No.1 on Amazon's British and US websites. The internet retailer is printing 100,000 copies of a leather-bound collectors' edition priced at STG50 ($A115) and expects them to sell out.