E-Books … A Major Shakeup is Coming … Stirred By the Wizard

The Wizaed Cometh

A crossp0st today from my Writers Welcome Blog  (WWB)… One I feel is interesting and important enough to promulgate to those that may not follow WWB:

Pottermore.com is coming! … And bringing with it a real time, online lab that should flush out issues like e-book pricing, eliminating digital booksellers (i.e. Amazon) as the middleman, acceptance of a common format (i.e. ePub) acceptable to all devices across all platforms.

Phewwww! What a statement. Sounds like rocket science when it’s only common sense.

This strategically, ingenious concept will force a faster solution to many bottlenecks created by the various device manufacturers and digital booksellers trying to kidnap the market for its own exclusive profit.

This could only be brought by something so popular and powerful unto itself that it would lend itself to an exclusive sales site, with its own rules, that would draw people away from the status quo.

That power is Harry Potter!

This from paidContent.org by Laura Hazard Owen:

Three Ways Pottermore.com Could Change Book Publishing

After a suspenseful buildup, J. K. Rowling has announced that Pottermore.com will be an e-bookstore, exclusively selling Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks. Pottermore could shake up digital publishing as much as the Harry Potter books first shook up print publishing over a decade ago. Here’s how.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) will be cut out as the middleman and could be forced to open up the Kindle to new book-publishing formats. Pottermore.com does not officially launch until October, and right now many details are still unclear. But we know that the site will be the only place to buy Harry Potter e-books and that they will be compatible with a range of devices. Rowling stressed that selling the books directly “means we can guarantee people everywhere are getting the same experience and at the same time,” and Pottermore CEO Rod Henwood told The Bookseller, “We want to make sure anyone who buys it can read it on any device. We are talking to the Kindles, the Apples, the Googles, Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) to make sure they are compatible. We set the pricing, we maintain the policy of making them available to as many readers as possible.”

We don’t know if that means that Pottermore.com will be selling multiple editions of the Harry Potter books—in the Kindle format, say, alongside formats like EPUB—but it seems more likely that the site would sell e-books in just one format, probably EPUB. Right now, the Kindle doesn’t support the EPUB format. But if any author could get Amazon to change its policy, it’s J. K. Rowling. The Kindle has the largest market share of any e-reader in the U.S.—it’s believed to be between 60 and 65 percent—and it would be an incredibly dumb move for Amazon not to allow the Harry Potter e-books to be read on its device. The company would risk losing users to the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Kobo, and other devices that do support EPUB.

In fact, rumors that Amazon is going to start supporting EPUB have been floating around for awhile now, mainly in association with the news that the Kindle will support library lending this fall. Amazon should probably get on the EPUB train by July 31, when Pottermore.com is going to be opened up to a select million users.

Interesting experiments with pricing. Since Rowling is selling the e-books directly, she can do what she wants with pricing. Her UK publisher, Bloomsbury, and her U.S. publisher, Scholastic, are getting a cut, but these books are being …

Read and learn more 

 

 

New Digital Publisher Hires "Harry Potter" Publisher

Open Road, a year-old digital publisher, is entering the children’s eBook market…and for starters they have acquired Barbara Marcus, the former children’s book publisher at Scholastic publishing…The one who secured the Harry Potter books!

Quite a coup.

Matthew Flamm reports this for Crain’s New York Business:

Digital publisher Open Road hires Barbara Marcus, the former Scholastic children’s book president who brought the Hero of Hogwarts to the world, as an adviser.

Open Road, the year-old digital publishing startup founded by Jane Friedman to focus primarily on backlist titles, has hired Harry Potter’s former publisher in an effort to break into children’s books.

Barbara Marcus, who was president of children’s book publishing and distribution at Scholastic until 2005, has been named an advisor for children’s publishing to Open Road Integrated Media. The announcement was made Wednesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Ms. Friedman, the onetime HarperCollins boss who is co-founder and chief executive of the New York City-based startup.

Ms. Marcus oversaw Scholastic’s acquisition of the first title in J. K. Rowling’s wildly popular series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which came out in 1998. She stayed on through the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, No. 6 in the series.

Read more http://alturl.com/qcj2w

A Multi-Book Deal at Age Six!

A six year old boy from India gets a multi-book deal from American publisher!

Damn, talk about predestined. I am astounded and happy for this little fellow. I think he has a future mapped out for him, thanks in no small part to his author mommy.

This from IndianExpress.com :

A six-year-old Harry Potter fan, whose school teachers once said that his story writing needed improvement, has bagged a multi-book publishing deal after he penned a mini-novel about his pet dog.

Little Leo Hunter wrote ‘Me And My Best Friend’ to tell the story of his alliance with pet Alsatian ‘Kugar’. His impressed mum Jamie, an author, contacted publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.

And, US firm Strategic Book Publishing liked the mini- novel so much that they to take it — and signed Leo to write 23 more, ‘The Sun’ reported.

He will get 20 per cent from early sales of the 10-pound, 25-page books. But this will rise to 50 per cent if more than 500 are sold. He will write under the same pseudonym as his mum, JS Huntlands, to protect his privacy.

Now, Leo says he wants to be “more famous than JK Rowling”. “I like Harry Potter but I like my books even more. Writing makes me very happy – it’s so interesting,” the boy, from Derby, was quoted as saying.

Though his primary school teachers were chuffed with his success, they once wrote a report saying his story writing needed improvement and he “needed to remember that there’s a beginning, middle and end”.

John’ Note: BTW, “chuffed” is a British word meaning “delighted”.