Amazon revealed as Rowling book buyer

The mystery bidder for J K Rowling's 1.95m book of fairy tales has been revealed as the online bookseller Amazon. The one-off handwritten copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard was sold at Sotheby's on Thursday.

All proceeds from the book's purchase will go to Rowling's charity, The Children's Voice.

When Amazon announced it was the winning bidder yesterday, it said it was its role in distributing millions of copies of Harry Potter books to children that had inspired it to enter the auction.

The founding chief executive of the online shop, Jeff Bezos, said: "Even before establishing her charity, J K Rowling had done the world a rare and immeasurably valuable service enlarging forever our concept of the way books can touch people, and in particular children, in modern times."

There are only seven copies of the volume of fairy tales, which is a spin-off from Rowling's highly successful Harry Potter series. In Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, stories from The Tales of Beedle the Bard play a key role in Harry's destruction of his long-standing enemy, Lord Voldemort.

After the sale, Rowling said: "This will mean so much to children in desperate need of help."