Futurebook is reporting that Pottermore, JK Rowling's portal for all things Harry Potter, was a big winner at The Bookseller Industry Awards. As author Philip Jones explains, the thrust of the message they are hearing now is that there is no longer such a thing as 'digital strategy.' It's all just strategy now. So, what do they think Pottermore is doing right? They identify four things Pottermore did incredibly well "for which the words 'game changer'" apply: 1. They created a commercial e-book platform that was at least as good as Amazon's 2. They set their own prices, and sustained them in the face...

Harry Potter shop opens (The Guardian)  Half of Amazon's Top-Ten Best-Selling Books of 2012 Are Erotic Romance (Digital Book World) Create Your Own Storybook App (Writer Unboxed) You Have Two, Maybe Three Years... (Publishers Weekly) Kindle Daily Deals: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin; Rainshadow Road (Friday Harbor) by Lisa Kleypas; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke; Infinity Ring Book 1: A Mutiny In Time by James Dashner * * *  ...

Just in time for the holiday season, the Pottermore e-book shop has added gifting options for Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. The gift e-books or audiobooks can be bought any time from up to six months in advance through the day on which they should be delivered. The books may be downloaded up to eight times each. All Pottermore e-books are multiformat and DRM-free. Pottermore has also just made the tie-in story collection The Tales of Beedle the Bard available as an e-book for the first time, for £3.99 in the U.K. and $5.99 in the U.S., with a...

As someone looking to join the e-reader world, I feel cautious about which device to choose. What with the new lines of Amazon and Kobo e-readers that just launched, and the fact that new tablets are coming out quicker than most people can keep track of them, there almost seems to be too many options. There are backlit and front-lit devices to think about; there are E Ink screens and LCD screens; there are touch-screens and page-turning tabs and ads and perks ... the task feels daunting. Thankfully, I recently stumbled upon a Tech News Daily article that helps consumers choose which...

 From Shelf Awareness: The Pottermore Shop willlaunch in Japan later this summer, featuring Japanese-language e-book editions of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels published in ePub3 format. A Japanese version of the Pottermore Experience will debut at a date yet to be announced, according to the company.Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said the Harry Potter books "have been phenomenally popular in Japan and we are delighted now to make the e-book version available in Japanese. We will also soon be making the free to use Experience available--which will offer Japanese Harry Potter fans the chance to explore and discover new writing by J.K. Rowling as...

Crain’s New York Business has a profile of Tor’s plan for a DRM-free e-book store. (The article is paywalled, but you can read it via Google News search.) It summarizes the situation with the DoJ antitrust lawsuit, and points to that suit and the success of the DRM-free Harry Potter e-book store as the reason publishers are seriously considering DRM-free options. That said, there is some new material here. Tor founder Tom Doherty and manager of science fiction Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk about wanting to build the kind of “diverse retail economy” you see in bookstores, and are in...

Amazon has just started lending Harry Potter books to their Prime members via Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. In this interesting video from The Wall Street Journal we can learn more on why Amazon decided to go into this deal with Pottermore, despite the fact, that they probably have to pay the full price of the book each time it’s borrowed. Via WSJDigitalNetwork – YouTube. Read an ebook. Get one from Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble or Kobo. (Via Ebook Friendly » Tips & More.)...

From A Kindle World Blog: All 7 of the Harry Potter books are now in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library I'll repeat some information from an earlier announcement borrowing via Amazon Prime Lending, who's eligible and whats involved.   The Potter eBooks had already been part of an exclusive worldwide e-book and digital audiobook distribution agreement with Overdrive for public and school libraries.   However, waiting lists at libraries are notoriously long, and books are due within 2 weeks in some.  So, the PRIME Kindle Lending Library will be a boon for many.   There are no waiting lists and no due dates.  ...

In case you were wondering, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling isn’t finished innovating in digital storytelling with Pottermore. At E3 yesterday, Sony announced an interactive storybook/game called “Book of Spells,” first in a series of interactive storybooks called “Wonderbook,” with all-new content written by Rowling. The game turns Sony’s PS Move motion-sensitive wand into a Hogwart’s-style magic wand, used for performing spells from a Hogwarts spellbook. The trailer is a bit misleading, showing a kid opening a book and it animating and magically transporting him into a wizard’s castle. The video from CNet of the E3 demo is a...

The UK’s Daily Mail surveyed 1,863 UK readers on their e-book reading habits and determined that 34% of the readers surveyed admitted to using e-readers to conceal that they were reading erotic literature, 57% to hide reading children’s books such as Harry Potter, and 26% to hide their science fiction habit. (Science fiction is the Rodney Dangerfield of literary genres—it gets no respect, sometimes even from its own fans.) All in all, counting overlap in categories, 58% of the readers admitted using the device to “hide” reading something they wouldn’t want others to see them with. So much...

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books. As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM)...

Kobo has joined Amazon and Barnes & Noble on the Hogwarts Express. The Bookseller reports that Kobo has launched its own Harry Potter e-book store. As with the others, it redirects customers to Pottermore to make the actual purchase, then allows them to link their Kobo and Pottermore accounts so they can download the books directly into their Kobo readers or apps. A spokesperson for Kobo added: “Unique to Kobo, readers will also be able to track their progress in books with awards from Kobo Reading Life, and share their thoughts on exciting passages with Kobo...