Google announced today that it landed the coveted ebook deal of a lifetime, to some extent. While Pottermore.com will be the exclusive sales location for the entire digital Harry Potter series, Pottermore and Google confirmed that they have joined up to allow consumers to store their Potter ebooks in their cloud-based Google Books libraries. This storage capacity will allow readers to access their Harry Potter ebooks from any enabled device.
Author J.K. Rowling opted to create Pottermore Publishing and sell the long-awaited digital editions of her books through her own site, bypassing Amazon, Apple, and Barnes and Noble. Google is coming out on top of this venture in another move by Pottermore, in that Google Checkout will be the third party purchasing platform for the Pottermore.com site.
Rowling has worked her own magic from the beginning, first by having the ability to look ahead down the road to the day that digital rights would be important to an author. When the series first debuted fourteen years ago and Rowling was an unpublished, unknown in literary circles, she managed to retain all digital rights to her current and future works, allowing her to keep them off the virtual shelves all this time due to her piracy concerns. As more and more authors now attempt to go back to their publishers to gain access to the rights to their unpublished digital books, Rowling enjoyed smooth sailing in the world of ebooks as she had the foresight to keep those rights at a time when digital books were unheard of.
Additionally, by being selective about what companies would be in on the final release of the ebook editions, Rowling has created her own publishing company solely to oversee the expected galactic-proportion sales of the Potter series, rather than conceding fees as high as 30% to the current online bookselling giants.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.
