It's official - the Inuyasha anime is scheduled to resume in Japan this fall, picking up where the original series left off. The first anime series came to an end when the animators caught up with the manga and had no story-lines to animate. The manga continued, finishing up with 56 volumes. The first anime series went up to about the middle of volume 36, leaving 20 volumes of material for the new series in Japan.

So far there is no word on how Viz, who holds the rights to the Inuyasha series in North America, will be releasing the series, but seeing that they are simultaneously posting chapters of the new Rumiko Takahashi manga series, RIN-NE ([link]) with their Japanese counterpart, it seems likely that they will do a quick release on the new Inuyasha series. Perhaps they'll stream a subbed version a few days after the airing of the episode in Japan, like Funimation is currently doing with the new Fullmetal Alchemist series, Brotherhood (you can find the first 20 or so episodes on the Funimation website).

Additionally, Viz has made some changes with the manga release here in the US. Starting in July of this year, they stopped "flipping" the manga and are now leaving it in the original right-to-left format of the Japanese release. They are also releasing one volume per month, which will bring the release date of the final volume to January 2011 and not the January 2014 date the old release schedule would have landed on.