J.K. Rowling Goes Direct to Consumers With Harry Potter E-Books
In a move that sidesteps traditional online booksellers such as Amazon and Apple's iBookstore, mega-selling author J.K. Rowling announced Thursday that she's created a site to sell all seven best-selling Harry Potter books for the first time in digital form beginning this summer. The digital books will be sold directly to consumers via a new site called Pottermore.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Rowling's free-to-use site will launch to an early million users on July 31st -- both Rowling's and Potter's birthday -- before opening to the general public this October. As with her tremendously secretive book manuscripts, Rowling is keeping an extremely protective eye on her digital sales.
"I'm phenomenally lucky that I had the resources to be able to do it myself," Rowling said in a video announcement on YouTube Thursday. With more than 450 million books sold worldwide, an eight-part film franchise from Warner Bros., and Universal Orlando's "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" theme park, Forbes set Rowling's net worth at $1 billion in 2010.
Unlike most authors who relinquish both print and digital rights to their publishers, Rowling herself owns the rights to digital versions of Harry Potter. Still, her U.K.-based publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC said in a statement Thursday that it would still be receiving a share of the revenue from Pottermore's e-book sales. Rowling's U.S.-based publisher Scholastic Inc. also announced Thursday that it was a "key partner" on Pottermore and would receive a royalty on sales of the U.S. editions of the e-books, including those sold via buyers routed to Pottermore from Scholastic channels. Rowling partnered with Sony Corp. to build the site and later sell Pottermore branded software products.
For true Harry Potter enthusiasts, Pottermore will be a dream come true. More than just an online bookstore, Pottermore will be a fully digitized wizarding world that allows visitors to bond over the books with games and social media (for more on what the Pottermore site will look like, read this story on CNET). Beyond the novels themselves, Rowling plans to empty her notebooks onto the site, giving eager fans more insight into the magical world she started creating on cocktail napkins two decades ago.
Though Rowling does not intend to write any more Potter-inspired novels, she has released more than 18,000 words of additional content for the site and says she intends to write more as well.
Alhough Rowling's free, original content will likely draw many fans to Pottermore, one analyst says he does not expect digital sales of Harry Potter books to compare to those of the original print books because of the latter's already ubiquitous presence.
"You can drive down a street almost anywhere on a Saturday and pick [a Harry Potter book] up at a yard sale," said Michael Norris, senior analyst at market research firm Simba Information. "The e-books will have to be much more than a book on a tablet."
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andy2580.
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