From The Bookseller:
Pottermore has responded to retailers’ frustrations over being unable to sell the Harry Potter e-books, saying the idea was to “ensure ease of availability across all reading devices”.
Retailers hit out at J K Rowling’s decision to sell the Harry Potter e-books directly through her Pottermore website, which will launch in October. A Pottermore spokesperson said: “Pottermore is designed to encourage the reading and re-reading of the Harry Potter books in all formats and editions, both print and digital, to both existing and new generations of readers. We think this will have a positive effect on those selling physical books as well as on sales of digital ones.”
He added: “The decision to make e-books exclusive to the site was to ensure ease of availability across all reading devices and to the widest possible audience and also to support the ultimate intention of the site to be an online reading experience.”
It isn’t clear who these retailers who are complaining are, except for one British (?) bookstore chain. Are these actually etailers or B&M / Mom and Pop bookstores?
How many retailers – if we ignore Amazon, Apple, Sony, Borders, and B&N, and possibly Walmart – who are legitimate booksellers ( and not the usual Internet bottom feeders ) are actually equipped to sell ebooks in agnostic formats like JKR and Pottermore have stated they plan to do?
This makes total sense for the customer. Anyone who can type in a web address can make it to the single place where you can find all the legal Harry Potter ebooks you desire to purchase. Once there, you don’t need to try and figure out which website has a digital copy that will work on your ereader and also which website will allow you to buy the book because of georestrictions or even if there is another website that is cheaper than the one you are looking at. JKR has the branding to allow her to sell directly to the customers. She would be an idiot to give that away (we can argue her idiocy in not producing ebooks earlier, but that is a different discussion)
The decision to cut out the retails is because they are irrelevant. It’s that simple. The writing is on the wall, retailers need to cop on.
This is interesting because there are very few places where you can buy an ebook based on what reader you want to use (smashwords is one, but that’s for self pub rather than big pub). Keeping the profit all for herself – way to go! Best of luck to her. If it’s effective, perhaps the other retailers will find a way to sell in all formats, or come up with an agreed single format.
Maybe this is why Amazon suddenly allowed other formats than AZW to be read on the Kindle?
AZW is amazon’s drm format for books, but you’ve *always* been able to load up any standard mobi pocket formatted books on a kindle.
Yes, Baeowulf, and Amazon’s format *IS* mobi. They own Mobipocket. Project Gutenberg has well over 30,000 books in non-DRM’d mobi format and they can be downloaded by a Kindle direct to the Kindle. Having a downloading web browser in an e-reader does help in that regard though other ereader makers pooh-pooh that when they don’t have it. Same goes for Internet Archive’s 2 million titles or so. Calibre is used by an outfit (Retroread, but we can also do it ourselves quickly) do free 2-minute conversions from non-DRM’d ePub to mobi format for Kindle, for the 1.5 million free Google books. Once completed, they are left available on a server for free download by any Kindle user.