New free Harry Potter books online: J.K. Rowling's 12 short stories as Christmas gift to fans

Harry Potter's best-selling author J.K. Rowling.Wikipedia

Early Christmas gifts will arrive to Potterheads worldwide, as author J.K. Rowling fills their virtual stockings with more short stories this season.  

The stories are connected to her famous wizard character and will be posted in her official website dedicated to all things Harry Potter. The news was announced on Friday via the official Facebook page, saying: 

"Christmas is coming early to Pottermore. Starting Friday, December 12, we'll be releasing a surprise for you every day on pottermore.com at 1pm GMT (8am EST). With wonderful new writing by J.K. Rowling in Moments from 'Half-Blood Prince', shiny gold Galleons and even a new potion or two, make sure you don't miss out – just visit pottermore.com and answer our rhyming riddles to unwrap a #PottermoreChristmas surprise every day.

This means that 12 new short stories written by the best-selling author will be posted online. These stories will be based on some of the characters in the iconic book franchise. 

One of them involves Draco Malfoy, Harry's biggest enemy in Hogwarts, and the son of one of the most famous Death Eaters in the novels. There will also be several featured potion recipes as well as fun contests that allow a reader to win prizes by managing to solve one of the "rhyming riddles" posted on the website. 

Rowling has been very generous to all her fans this year. Last Halloween, the author released a six-essay collection on the Pottermore website. But since she loves having fun with her readers, she hid the writings in the website, and fans could only read them by unlocking the corresponding riddles. One of the essays posted focused on the backstory of Dolores Umbridge, an extremely hated character in the books. 

Aside from Draco, a minor character named Florean Fortescue will also be featured in the upcoming series of short stories. Forstescue can be remembered as the owner of the ice cream shop located in Diagon Alley, where Harry sometimes did his homework.