Watch below as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling announces Pottermore, a new online destination to explore the magical world of Harry Potter at pottermore.com. Full details of the website will be revealed on July 31st (Rowling and Harry Potter‘s birthday).
“I’ll be sharing additional information that I’ve been hoarding for years about the world of Harry Potter,” Ms. Rowling said in a Thursday press conference in London. “I can be creative in a medium that didn’t exist back in 1990 when I started writing the books.”
More amazing news, however, is that J.K. Rowling will release the entire Harry Potter series as ebooks — selling the digital editions direct to consumers, bypassing publishers and tablet book readers like the iPad, Nook, and Amazon. The ebooks will certainly work on those devices, but she’s not sharing a cut of the profits with Amazon or Apple). Smartly, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Whereas publishers for other authors often own both the print and digital rights for books, Ms. Rowling owns the rights to the digital versions of the Harry Potter books herself. The digital rights aren’t held by her U.K. publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, or by Scholastic Inc., which owns the U.S. print rights. “E-books are here, and they are here to stay,” she says. “I still love a print and paper book, but I think you can enjoy both.”