JK Rowling says – let’s make ebooks

TheBookSeller.com reports that JK Rowling has seen the light and will allow selling of her Harry Potter series digitally.  Whew good thing, finally people might eventually get Harry Potter as an ebook.

Small problem. Fans have already typed out all the books and made PDFs, ePubs and text downloads long ago. Had this been available earlier from the publisher(s), there would have been sales to take advantage of at the time. But customers have been lost.

There was an interesting point made in the article. To create a book experience unique to the franchise, it’s gotta be more than text, wouldn’t you think?  There’s an entire theme park built around Harry Potter as well as the movies. It’s almost embarrassing if they didn’t dig a little deeper for the ebook version.  The question was, for this book to be successful, does one partner with a publisher, animation studio, app developer or what?

Good question.  If you try to make apps, you’ll be making more than one for the various devices, iPad, Android, Flash / Adobe AIR etc. If you want to reach the e-reader market, you won’t really be able to have anything but text.  If somebody buys one, will they get access to all? Will one be cheaper than another? Will there be a discount over the whole set? Will it be affordable, or is it better to just pick up a used copy somewhere, since there are thousands of those everywhere. Everytime I go to the thrift store, they have Harry Potter books. Plus if you have the DVDs, where does an enhanced book fit in? Might it be a lot of work just for something gimmicky? And when it comes to sales, does that matter?  Will e-books have anything to give to collectors? A gold CD or something? Or how about a dedicated Harry Potter tablet? That could actually work given the popularity of this franchise.