If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some 400+ D.C. library users awaited 60 electronic copies of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the best-selling fiction title on the New York Times list. And a digital version of The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling, was not even in the catalog of the D.C. public library system. Could a well-stocked national digital library system—in...

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...

  Numbers show that the publishing industry is handling the rise of e-readers better than what folk knowledge might suggest. The fall publishing season is in full swing. There can hardly have been a year with more luminaries atop both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists; J. K. Rowling, Michael Chabon, Ken Follett, Junot Diaz, among others, represent literary acclaim and commercial appeal. Diaz (This Is How You Lose Her) is having an especially good run: He is both a National Book Award finalist and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" prize. Stephen Colbert, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Young, Bob Woodward, and Salman Rushdie...

J.K. Rowling's first adult novel hit stores (and e-book readers) today, and almost immediately, the lukewarm reviews trickled in—not for the content of the book itself, but for the Kindle formatting: a glitch on the tech end (which this article attributes to an unspecified 'issue' on the end of Hachette, the publisher) made it impossible for Kindle readers to adjust the font size to their preference. You had to read it in either Really Big or Teeny Tiny, with no in between. Curiously mixed in with these complaints was an outcry over the e-book price: $17.99, based on a discount off the...

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 Bookseller reports that, after a closed beta that lasted a lot longer than originally promised, the Pottermore website based around the Harry Potter books has finally fully opened to the public. The site began taking on new users very early Saturday morning, intentionally opening at a time of low demand, but even as the day went on, Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said that traffic rates were not “anywhere near a level that we are concerned about.” The reason for the extended closed beta was to get the site ready to handle the expected high traffic, and Redmayne...

Not long after one of The Guardian’s writers complained about Pottermore’s eternal closed beta, the Pottermore website has announced it will be opening to all in early April, only six months after it had originally intended to do so. Apart from a variety of social activities themed around the Harry Potter universe, Pottermore will also be the source of the long-awaited official (and DRM-free!) Harry Potter e-books. The lengthy delay came about, Pottermore’s announcement explains, because the early beta stages revealed that the site, as originally conceived, was not going to hold up under visits by millions of users:...

More proof, if any was needed, that writers write for more reasons than just money. J.K. Rowling, who could live comfortably off of Harry Potter even if she never wrote another word in her life, has announced she will be publishing an adult novel later this year. There is no word yet as to what the book will be about or even what genre it will be in, but Rowling is publishing it through Hachette’s Little, Brown imprint in both the US and UK, and other Hachette companies worldwide. Notably, Little, Brown will have the e-book as well as...

The Bookseller reports that the Pottermore website has postponed the release of the Harry Potter e-books until the first half of 2012. The site’s web shop will now open in 2012 instead of early October as previously planned. Pottermore is also extending the beta-testing period of the website, and will now open registration to new users at the end of October....

Wired has an extensive report on J.K. Rowling’s rumor-surrounded “Pottermore” website, which is due to launch in October (just in time for Halloween). The big part of the story of interest to TeleRead readers is that Pottermore will be the exclusive outlet for the Harry Potter e-books, and the e-books will be DRM-free (albeit digitally watermarked with the identity of the purchaser), meaning (as least as far as Wired claims) that they will not be locked into any one device or platform. The first e-book will be available at launch, in multiple languages, with others to follow in...

The Scotsman reports that J.K. Rowling’s agents have announced she is at last considering an e-book release of her beloved Harry Potter series. If this sounds familiar, it’s because her agents said the exact same thing last May. Strangely, nothing ever came of it in the eleven months since. Sure does take her a while to make up her mind, doesn’t it? Certainly, Rowling’s 800-page megatomes are immensely suitable for e-book release—heavier than some college textbooks, they have undoubtedly wreaked considerable havoc on the spines of young readers who had no choice but to tote them to school...

Bloomsbury has released a financial report stating it anticipates 2011 to be the “year of the e-book,” The Bookseller reports. Currently its e-book sales come in at just less than 10% of trade print sales. CEO Nigel Newton said that e-books were experiencing “extraordinary” growth. Bloomsbury released 1,800 e-books in 2010. and saw sales increase considerably—Newton said that e-book owners were buying more e-books now than they had bought print books before they owned an e-reader. (Not too surprising; e-books are often less expensive than print now, so people can afford to buy more of them.) ...