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Pottermore.com: the end of traditional bookstores?

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You want more Harry Potter? … Welcome to Pottermore.com. J.K. Rowling, now successful as a result of her fantasy series for young adults (and big kids) Harry Potter, offers us even more with the debut of the website Pottermore.com, unveiled to the press in London last Thursday. “Sorry to get around to it so late (Cannes’ fault, obliged to drink with colleagues, I’ll get back to that a little later), but what’s important is the initiative because it may create a black hole in the book universe. And may also foreshadow reading of the future!”

The adventures of Harry Potter ended with the seventh tome, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. However, the book series is making its comeback as e-books. In fact, the interactive site will be the first to sell the seven volumes of Harry Potter as e-books since they were only available as hard copies or audio recordings. “I wanted to give something back to the fans that have followed Harry so devotedly over the years, and to bring the stories to a new digital generation,” Rowling said cited from the New York Times.

The upshot would of course be the new reading experiences that these e-books will offer: their author promises it. New experiences like illustrations and interactive elements. The site will also include a social network, an adventure to discover and read, all while interacting. In fact, the site proposes rediscovering the entire world of Harry Potter by creating a character, in the form of an avatar, which will have the mission of being admitted to the one of the houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Author of the Future: Never give up your digital rights!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cunningly, throughout the publication of her blockbusters, Rowling was careful to never give up her digital rights to her publisher, despite repeated entreaties by her publisher to digitally format her works. She did much better than just publish them: as electronic sales of popular books went through the roof the last few years, she ensured that her works would be sold on her own on-line store in October, integrated with Pottermore.com, in favour of the first available eReaders (such as the Amazon Kindle) and tablets like the iPad.

Exclusive network of virtual distribution

Even better, she reserved the exclusivity of the online sale of her e-books in numerous languages. Online vendors such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble will not have any such rights. These two giants are de facto excluded from this new distribution network: online sales, along with independent bookstores, responsible in part for the rise of Harry Potter. It was the them who ensured promotions like the midnight releases. That’s gotta sting a little… J.K.Rowling assures herself the exclusive right, a first for an author. Only her editors, Scholastic and Bloomsbury, will collect a part of the revenue (an undisclosed amount). She has become the sole online owner and manager of the Harry Potter brand.

At the same time, Rowling salts Amazon’s wounds by circumventing their business policy. The digital copies of the books will be sold in EPUB and for the Kindle (not a huge success in France, but which received a warm welcome across the pond). Because readers never visit its online store, Amazon won’t earn a penny in commission. But Jeff Bezos could prohibit the reading of the files on his device…

Booksellers aren’t too happy with the knife that Rowling left in their backs. “We are disappointed, having been such key factors in the growth of the Harry Potter phenomenon since the publication of the first book, that the market would be closed to such an anticipated digital version” said a spokesman for Waterstone cited from Actualitté.com. [FR]

In preserving her monopoly on the digital distribution of her books, the author hopes to slow down the pirating of her books, which are among the most downloaded on content sharing websites. She will sell the books in EPUB format, watermarked, so as to link the identity of the author to their purchased copy of the book. This won’t stop the illegal sharing of the digital works, but it will make it a lot easier to track down certain copies (or the buyer who initially uploaded it).

We’ll just have to wait and see if the author, strong after her Hollywood success (400 million copies sold), really does open a blackhole in the ruthless universe of publishing, and if she will be followed by others…

Article originally published Miscellaneous under the title “J. K. Rowling lance son Pottermore.com: bye bye les libraires old school ?”

Image CC Flickr PaternitéPas d'utilisation commerciale jovike


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