It is truly a magical day, Harry Potter fans, for the incredibly popular Harry Potter series is now available in its entirety in both e-book and audio book form at Pottermore.com.
The bulk of the Pottermore site is not open, but at least the shop is there, so if you’ve been wanting easily portable copies you can have with you at all times on your various devices, you’re now in luck.
The details:
- Purchasing the books entitles you to 8 downloads from Pottermore.com – but don’t let that worry you just yet, because:
- One of those downloads can be used to send your book to your Amazon.com account, where it will live in the cloud, available for use on your Kindle or Kindle apps forevermore and downloadable as many times as you desire.
- They can also be sent to your Google Play, Sony Reader, or Barnes & Noble accounts, where I assume it works like the Amazon account. I don’t use those platforms though, so if you know the pertinent details, let us know in the comments!
- And finally, you can use up one of your downloads to grab a DRM-free ePub version for use on virtually any other eReader you can imagine, including Apple iBooks, Kobo, Adobe’s reader, etc.
- The books are watermarked to the individual user, so just because there’s no DRM, I’d think twice before putting your legally purchased copy up on torrent sites or letting all your friends have copies.
- The first three books in the series are going for $7.99 US, $7.96 CDN each, with the last four going for $9.99 US, $11.15 CDN each.
- The complete set of 7 will run you $57.54 US, $61.65 CDN, roughly a 10% discount. I can personally confirm that buying the set will give you the 7 individual books, not one big eBook containing all 7 titles in one file, and each book has the full 8 downloads allocated to it.
- Our American friends need not worry; though I’ve included an image of the new eBook cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, you can get Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone if you live in the US. In fact, if you could let us know in the comments if it’s possible for you to even get the UK version, that’d be great!
- The books are available for sale on Amazon.com’s site, though buying them there redirects you to Pottermore.com for the actual transaction. The same is true of other eBook retailers; all of them send you to Pottermore.
It’s absolutely remarkable that Rowling is powerful enough as an author to command this kind of service from Amazon and the other eBook retailers. She is having them drive traffic to her site where you buy her books, and then take advantage of their services after that. Obviously they must be getting some cut of the transaction for this to be possible, but you can bet it’s not as large a piece as they normally command, and notice that Apple’s iBooks is not represented; you have to use the ePub format because the Potter books are not available in Apple’s iBooks store. I guess Apple’s too attached to that 30% requirement, and Rowling simply doesn’t need them, so has no reason to give up that kind of a percentage.
So who’s up for a reread? If you’ll excuse me, Hagrid was about to drop baby Harry off at the Dursley’s place…
No, you cannot purchase the UK versions directly from Amazon. You CAN, however, create a separate account and “gift” the UK version to said account.
That’s a fantastic tip. Thanks Joshua!