coverUpdate: If you didn’t already grab it, looks like it’s too late now. The price has gone back up to the same $56.64 that everywhere else is charging.

Speaking of Harry Potter, a friend just called my attention to this great deal in the US Kindle store. Amazon has a single-e-book edition of all seven Harry Potter novels, Harry Potter: The Complete Collection, currently listed at $14.99. That’s almost 75% off the $56.64 Pottermore is charging for the e-book collection on its own site or Google Play.

I don’t have any way of knowing how long this price is going to last—the price listing says it was set by the publisher, Pottermore, so Pottermore could change its mind at any time. But if you haven’t ever gotten around to buying Harry Potter electronically, or you’d like to have it in a 10-megabyte single-volume edition, $2.14 per book is not at all a bad price to pay for the series.

I can’t readily tell whether this edition has DRM on it—there’s no listing for “simultaneous device usage,” which is normally what you look for to be able to tell. Pottermore usually leaves DRM off on its own editions, but I don’t know what it does for e-books sold via Amazon. However, even if it does have DRM, it’s still an incredible bargain at that price.

7 COMMENTS

  1. As with the recent audiobook release on Audible.com, read by Jim Dale, these are the U.S. editions, with all British spelling re-spelled, and all British terms “translated” into American. Uncle Vernon parks his car in a “parking lot” rather than a “car park,” for instance. Dumbledore eats “lemon drops” instead of “sherbet lemons.” Etc, etc. Even the title of the first book is “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” rather than the original title, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.”

    It’s a great bargain if the reader doesn’t mind any of this twiddling with the original language, but I’m glad I found the Stephen Fry audiobooks at a Canadian retailer, and I will likewise hold out for the original e-books if I can find them.

  2. Notice that these ebooks do have text-to-speech enabled, so if you’ve got a long daily commute and haven’t read the series, this might be an inexpensive opportunity way to do that.

    I read or listened to all of them as they came out but, to be honest, the sheer complexity of the tale and the long delays between volumes mean I now have only the sketchiest memory of the plot: something on the order of Harry Potter good, Voldemort bad.

    What I’d like to see is probably heresy to many Potter fans. I’d love a condensed, single-volume version, perhaps with notes so I can follow all the twists and turns. I simply don’t have the time to go through it another time.

    I agree with Bridget. There’s no reason to Americanize British novels. The story is set in the UK, so Dumbledore should eat “sherbet lemons” rather than “lemon drops.” How are children to learn about other cultures if everything in the stories they read is Americanized? I don’t even have any problem with leaving the spelling quirks between the two unchanged, i.e. centre rather than center.

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