Recently, JK Rowling unveiled her new website Pottermore.com, which offers a whole new dimension to the Harry Potter series by offering ebooks of all 7 books.
It has delighted her fans, who have been waiting for the ebooks, and offers the possibility of extra stuff about the series, previously unreleased material written by Rowling.
However, it has worried the book industry, with retailers complaining because they are banned from selling the ebooks. Obviously, Waterstones had a huge role in launching the Harry Potter books from their stores at special launch events, which have been attended by huge numbers of fans queuing all night to get their copies of the books at each book launch. Retailers wanted to cash in on the ebook release of the biggest selling books of all time in a similar way to the printed book releases, but JK Rowling’s decision to limit the ebook sales to her website has annoyed a lot of people. She clearly wants to control the ebook sales and protect her material.
The books will be available as ebooks and audiobooks, and in many languages, as it is the only place where the books are available.
I suspect that the website will crash in October when the ebooks are made available to purchase for the first time, as pretty much every fan will be accessing the website as soon as its announced! It will cause problems i’m sure, as the demand will be ridiculous! Surely it would have been easier to spread the ebook sales around several retailers to ease the predicted congestion and mania of the ebook releases!
Ah well.
I’m not sure i will be buying the ebooks, as i have the paper books already, sitting proudly on their bookshelf in all their colourful glory! Unless i can afford to buy an Ipad or something by October of course! But i will definitely be looking at the Pottermore website when its launched properly to see what its like… although i might leave it a few weeks because i suspect i won’t be able to access it right away if the sheer volume of traffic crashes the site!
