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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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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It has been a long wait, but now it has happened.  Pottermore is now selling the complete Harry Potter collection in ebook format, and selling them via almost all online ebook sellers.  The notable exception being iTunes, the Apple online ebook store.  I have no idea why they are not included, but that is how it is.   However, don’t worry, you will still be able to read them on your iPad I assume, merely buy them from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony, Pottermore itself or any of the other online ebook stores who do sell them.

No DRM this time….  Almost.

In a break with the normal way of selling and protecting ebooks, Pottermore are selling the entire collection in a DRM free form – well almost DRM free.   What they have done is bunged a small bit of software into the ebooks, which they call a Watermark, so that they can see who purchased the individual ebook which will enable them to identify who the pirate is if any of these ebooks hit the illegal market.  And then the sky will presumably fall on the head of the individual who copied and sold the ebook illegally online.

At last we can read our ebooks on any ereader.

What is revolutionary about this approach is that it means that if you buy one or more of these ebooks, you can move them from device to device, lend them to friends, given them away and so on, just as you would with a paper book – all of which are impossible with normally DRM protected ebooks, which will only work on your own ereader, and no where else.  The only restriction is that you may not copy them and sell them online.

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Pottermore.com have released a statement on their website in which they tell us that they will throw their doors open to the world sometime in April.  Excitement unlimited in the world of Harry Potter fans!

Pottermore.com, which has been sort of open since last year, but “only” for a maximum of 1 million members as a sort of Beta test of the functioning of the site, will finally be available to all you Hogwarts fans sometime in April in all its glory.

Making sure it will all work:

They explain the long Beta phase by saying that they wanted to ensure that the whole site would work properly once the many millions of expected visitors arrived.   Apparently they discovered that the way the site had been set up (behind the scenes, not what we see) would have floundered to a grinding halt if so many people tried to access it as are expected to want to become members of the Pottermore world, so they have been making major changes to how it all functions.

After what they describe as a lot of work – which I can well believe – they are now apparently comfortable with what they have set up, and are ready to hit the road running.

Or as they put it in their Press Release:

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In a surprising move, it was announced today that the entire collection of Harry Potter ebooks will not only be distributed on Pottermore (the official Harry Potter website) as we had all been told, but also via public libraries through OverDrive.

To quote from the Press Release I received:

Pottermore, the online experience and home of the Harry Potter eBooks created by J.K. Rowling and partnered by Sony, announced today it has entered into an exclusive worldwide eBook and digital audiobook distribution agreement with OverDrive for public and school libraries. Under the terms of the agreement, OverDrive, a leading global distributor of eBooks and digital audiobooks, will manage hosting and digital fulfillment for libraries for the Harry Potter collection of eBooks and digital audiobooks in English and more than 20 other languages to OverDrive’s growing network of over 18,000 public and school libraries worldwide.

We can now all read the Potter ebooks if we belong to a library:

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The much trumpeted Harry Potter Website has had to announce a serious delay in its plans to start selling all the Hogwarts books as ebooks.

The idea was that they would start selling the Harry Potter books online as ebooks this month (October 2011), but apparently owing to a combination of several million frenzied kids playing away at some form of Wizard’s fencing online game on the Pottermore site and other unspecified problems, they have announced that they will start selling those ebooks sometime next year.

Many commentators have pointed out that this means they will miss the Christmas shopping frenzy, but it has also been pointed out that they don’t really need to give a damn about this, as they have already made more money than one would think possible from those books.

As a spokeperson for Pottermore puts it:

(we)are in no rush to launch anything until all potential problems have been sorted out. . A delayed launch may even mean a greater second wave of excitement about the ebooks becoming available as the anticipation builds up over a longer period of time.”

However, one thing they may have overlooked here is that in setting up this website with lots of trumpets and drums, they have pulled Harry Potter fans onto the net, and will certainly have thus caused many of them to realize that they can download any or all the Harry Potter books in ebook format from no end of free (illegal) torrent sites, which must effect sales when finally Pottermore get themselves together enough to actually open shop.

Link to Pottermore: http://www.pottermore.com/

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So, what do you think about not being able to (legally) get hold of Harry Potter books as ebooks?