Graphic courtesy of Insider.Pottermore.com
No, GoodeReader isn’t publishing in foreign languages, but luckily for Harry Potter fans, Pottermore.com is. The Pottermore Insider blog today announced that the recently published Harry Potter ebooks are now available in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
JK Rowling made an incredibly bold move when she originally retained the digital rights to her Harry Potter series, which includes seven installments in the boy wizard’s life and one offshoot title, with a forthcoming encyclopedia to the series promised. In an even bolder move, Rowling published the ebooks through her own site only a few weeks ago and gave several other online retail booksellers the take-it-or-leave-it deal of a lifetime: other retailers’ customers can go to their favorite online book sites to purchase the books, which diverts them to Pottermore for the sale, then the original retailers will still send the ebooks to the consumers’ e-reader devices without requiring the downloading to a computer and transferring via cable that many customers have to rely on when purchasing books from sites other than the one that markets their e-readers.
As with the English editions, customers from the Amazon online stores in these foreign language markets can click on Amazon.it, for example, in order to purchase the Harry Potter ebooks and then be redirected to Pottermore.com for the purchase.
Some have speculated as to whether JK Rowling may have started a coup in traditional publishing by having the clout to tell the online booksellers that they will agree to these terms in order to provide their customers with ebooks from bestselling authors. Stephen King, Amanda Hocking, and Janet Evanovich all have very dedicated fans, and retailers would be foolish not to agree to the terms these authors and their publishers set in order to be able to provide those titles for digital consumers. Of course, it is the disagreements over the contracts in the industry that are causing some authors—and their readers—to skip the process altogether in favor of small press and indie publishing as Rowling has.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.