The entire Harry Potter saga is now available to be directly purchased from your favorite digital bookstore. In the past, if a retailer was listing the books it would redirect you to the J.K. Rowling Pottermore website to complete the transaction. Now, everything is seamless.
Pottermore launched in 2012 as a digital home for all things Potter. Anyone who wanted the books had to come directly to the website. In order to draw attention to their service they did a cross-promotion with Sony. Anyone who want a PRS-T1 or PRS-T2 e-reader got a free Harry Potter e-book. Once the Sony contract expired, Pottermore found themselves in a situation where sales dropped 352% in March 2015 from £24.8 million to £7 million. The entire Pottermore service than suffered a horrific loss of £6 million in 2015.
The mounting loses were enough to convince Pottermore and J.K. Rowling to have less control over the sales and distribution of the e-books and start allowing Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other retailers to market them directly. This is a win for customers who are often loyal to one particular bookstore and want to read all things Potter on their e-reader.
Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.