Pottermore – the website that sells all the Harry Potter ebooks has developed a couple of marketing strategies that are completely new in the ebook world,and that appear to be working very well.

These strategies are also working very well for us the consumers, and also for the main distributors of ebooks (Sony, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo).  Win – win all round thus.

So what are these new tricks they have come up with?

There are really two new strategies they have put into place, the first is possible owing to the extraordinarily strong position of the Harry Potter Franchise in the marketplace and probably wouldn’t happen for a lesser product.

What they have done is to make deals with the big ebook distributors in which the Harry Potter ebooks are offered on the online ebook stores of those companies, but they do not actually sell them to you, you are instead sent to the Pottermore website and buy the ebooks there, and presumably the referrers get a sort of finders commission on all Harry Potter ebooks sold via their online stores.

This is how it works.

You go to the Nook, Sony, Kobo or Kindle site and select a Harry Potter title. After selected, a pop-up appears, which reads:

You are on your way to enjoying your Harry Potter ebook by purchasing it through the Pottermore website.

You’ll be taken to Pottermore.com and asked to sign in or create a new account. Once you do, you’ll immediately get access to this book, and other exclusive writings from J.K. Rowling.

A bit around the houses……

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In an extremely upbeat press release, Kobo have just announced that we can now buy all the Harry Potter ebooks from their online store to read on our various Kobo ereading devices.

So, all great news?

Not really, since what actually happens is that if you go to the part of their online store that deals with the Harry Potter ebooks, you are actually redirected to the Pottermore site and you buy them there.

In fact, as with the Kindle versions of these ebooks, you actually deal with J.K.Rowling’s own ebook website (Pottermore) and not with Kobo or Amazon.

Thus you might as well go direct to Pottermore, buy your ebooks there and then load them into whichever ereader you happen to have, as they sell the ebooks in all the various formats that are currently out there, and as they are not DRM protected, you can happily bung them onto whichever ereader you want.

The press release is a wonderful document however, worth quoting from, as it is so breathless and worked up about this non-event… here are some extracts:-

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I see on Nate Hoffelder always interesting and readable blog – The Digital Reader – that Sony have come back to their earlier offer of a free Harry Potter ebook if you buy their WiFi ereader.

As you may have noticed back in the early exciting days when Pottermore announced their existence and plans for selling all  the Harry Potter ebooks via their own website, Sony at the time announced that as part of the launch of that website, they would give anyone who bought a brand new Sony WiFi ereader a coupon to get Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for free from Pottermore.

Well, this didn’t happen as you know, since Pottermore took much longer to come to full life that was expected, months longer in fact.  So Sony withdrew that offer.  Well they really had no choice as Pottermore would not sell  or give away any Harry Potter ebooks until they had their site exactly how they wanted it to be.

Well, that happy situation is now with us, and Pottermore is going great guns and millions of ebook copies of the Harry Potter books are pouring through Cyberspace as the world buys the whole set in ebook form.

Sony try again……………

So, Sony in an attempt to boost sales of their WiFi ereader have reintroduced that offer.   Thus, if you now go out and buy one of these ereaders, you will get a coupon that will enable you to get your free copy of that ebook from Potttermore….  Joy unconfined say I.

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Pottermore (the website of the Harry Potter ebooks) has dispensed with the traditional form of copyright protection – the dreaded and hated DRM system – and instead used a system that allows us to actually own the ebooks we buy from them.   If this takes off, it could finally spell the end of the DRM system so beloved of large publishing houses.

Generally if we buy an ebook that was written by an established author and published by one of the larger publishers, it will have some form of digital rights management (DRM) built into it.  These system attempt to make it impossible for us to make illegal copies of the ebooks thus “protected” and then sell them on..

DRM doesn’t work guys…………….

As has been shown over and over again, this form of protection simply does not work.  It is the work of minutes on Google to find free software to strip this protection away from our ebooks, and thus be able to copy them to our heart’s content.   It is illegal to do this in fact, but that has never stopped anyone from doing it obviously.

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Synopsis:  This morning, Nate Hoffelder has reported on his blog The Digital Reader (link below) that the first illegal copy of one of the new Pottermore DRM free Harry Potter ebooks has appeared on the web.

One born every minute:

STUPID AND FAILED PIRATE

It seems that the form of anti-copying protection that Pottermore have chosen to use is in the form of a number of small files concealed in the body of the ebook, which gives details of the person who purchased the particular copy of the ebook.  This is great for honest readers, as it enables one to move the ebook from one device to any other freely, so effectively bringing ebooks into the realm of ordinary paper books finally.

But obviously it also makes it very easy (one might think) to copy and sell online , which is what this individual has apparently done.

But as Nate has pointed out, the software in the ebook he has placed online to sell, has this secret sting in its tail, enabling the Pottermore folk to identify him easily.  So no doubt an army of lawyers is already on their way to the guy’s house to impound all his worldly possessions, up to and including his wife and children, for his temerity in offering to sell people copies of his Pottermore ebook.

I will be very interested to hear how this story plays out, since the approach to ebook piracy that Pottermore have chosen is so much better from the point of view of us, the readers, than the dreadful Adobe DRM system that we have all had to deal with since the start of ebooks.

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Synopsis:  Pottermore – the Harry Potter website – opened its doors properly a couple of days ago, and now libraries and schools can also supply you with your favourite Harry Potter Story – for free.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the Harry Potter website – Pottermore – has finally stopped being in test phase, and is now open and fully functional, so obviously you can now go there and buy any of the Harry Potter ebooks you have not already downloaded for free from one or other of the many pirate websites who have had ebook versions of the whole set for ages.

Concurrently with this opening of the Pottermore site, the agreement they have with Overdrive has now also swung into action, and all the Harry Potter ebooks can now be borrowed from any library that lends ebooks, which includes loads of school libraries around the world.

Borrow and save money.

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