Surprise surprise! Today's announcement from JK Rowling, that the new website Pottermore is going to be a mecca for all things Harry Potter in the digital universe can't come as a surprise for many people. Since April, there has been speculation that Rowling has been considering entering the ebook market, so the Pottermore revelation wasn't a big surprise to a lot of us. Nor is it a big surprise that the website is so overwhelmed at the moment that they can't even accept email addresses to be notified when registration is ready to begin. I can only imagine how overwhelmed the website will be when people actually want to download books.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it won't be open for business until October. Hopefully by then, Pottermore will be able to handle the capacity it will clearly need to handle the number of readers who have been asking for YEARS to download her books. Instead, Rowling will release them all on one day to millions of readers, who will swamp a system incapable today of handling the input of email addresses.
Another possibility is that the books will be priced so high, that readers who are already getting tired of the price-gauging going on in the publishing industry, will simply choose to say, "no thank you." As an ereader since the early day of the Kindle, as much as I would love to have the Harry Potter books on my Kindle, I'm not willing to pay hardcover prices for them- particularly since if I bought them on my Amazon account, I'd be able to share it among the 4 other Kindlers who share my account.
I'm very curious to see what Rowling's license agreements will be on her books as well as her prices. But the fact that she won't allow Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other major retailers to carry the digital rights to her books does not fill me with the warm fuzzy feeling I think the rest of the Potterverse is feeling today. While I fully recognize Rowling's right to control what happens with the material she created, I think that there also comes a point where her control begins to look a lot like greed.
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