From March 29, 2012
Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at the invi­ta­tion of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

 

Message from Pottermore: It’s the content, stupid

 

Well. Tuesday was certainly a blogger’s pants-wetter, wasn’t it? With your kind permission, I offer the mildest caricature of the ‘sphere…

• 6:47 a.m. … The Pottermore store is open early!…
• 7:40 a.m. …damned DST, it’s April in England already…
• 8: 17 a.m. …Pottermore ebooks are being sold DRM-free…
• 8: 25 a.m. … it’s encrypted up to a hog’s wart on my Kindle…
• 10:05 a.m. … who put that watermark on Harry’s forehead?…
• 10:40 a.m. … whoa, look at Barnes & Noble empty out…
• 10:45 a.m. … BN is sending its Harry Potter fans to Pottermore to get their Nook-ish editions of the ebooks…
• 10:55 a.m. …Zou bisou bisou…
• 11:03 a.m. …Sony Reader Store same thing…
• 11:20 a.m. … wait, not Amazon, too! Jeff Bezos is sending his customers away to Pottermore. Say it ain’t so…
• 11:21 a.m. … why not sell himself a handbag and go to hell in it…
• 11:26 a.m. … that’s how the English witch Rowls…
• 11:27 a.m. … and all Yahoo shall be her parking lot…
• 11:32 a.m. … it’s another British invasion…
• 12:20 p.m. … I saw Goody Rowling with the Devil…
• 12:22 p.m. … whites of their eyes, Bezos…
• 1:08 p.m. … into a toad under a cabbage in Seattle…
• 2:04 p.m. … wait a minute, wait a minute…
• 2:07 p.m. … she’s taken away the Buy buttons…
• 2:25 p.m. … look out, she’s got a wand!…
• 2:26 p.m. … duck, you snitch!…
• 2:49 p.m. … she must have side-swiped Shatzkin, his hair doesn’t always stand on end like that, does it?…

Writing his second article in as many days for TheFutureBook on it, Philip Jones — to my mind our lead reporter on this big story — captured the uproar nicely in The Guardian’s How Pottermore cast an ebook spell over Amazon and, here, in TheFutureBook’s Pottermore gets its wand on:

Having been briefed on how the Harry Potter e-books would come to market last week, even I have been surprised by the reaction—particularly among the digerati who have spent the past 24 hours unpicking the nuances. It was never going to be easy to match expectations, particularly for a brand such as Harry Potter which has to worry about fans as young as six and seasoned publishing observers as wise as Mike Shatzkin.

And speaking of Mike Shatzkin, without overreaching about the mechanics, he went to work as the news developed to get some industry-dynamics context onto the moment before it was frittered away in speculation about the technology used. Here he is in What’s the greater fear for publishers? Amazon or piracy?

In a refreshing change from recent history, the content owner was able to present Amazon with a “take it or leave it” proposition. They decided to “take it”. They were wise. The game was changing either way.

Shatzkin hit every mark, as he usually does, for his audience — people whose main perspective is that of the publishing core and its business operations.

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And for them, for everyone, even those not considered central to the industry, the salient points of what has happened are these:

• 

  Pottermore’s unprecedented agreement with the major retailers except Apple succeeds in breaking Harry Potter buyers free of those sites and tractor-beaming them in to Pottermore.

• There, the author collects those readers’ money. Now, in one write, this is all you’d think Pottermore got from this extraordinary setup. Leigh Beadon at TechDirt delivers a those click-weary, whining reception: Harry Potter And The Missing Middlemen: Where The Pottermore Store Goes Wrong. Pottermore, Beadon pouts, means “the fans suffer” from having to open a Pottermore account. That’s a point: The poor things have to type in their first and last names and address and everything, you know. Beadon sobs on:

The only advantage is that Rowling makes a little bit more money from each sale—but not all the money, because despite being a direct-to-fan model, her publisher apparently still gets a cut, and the partner bookstores will be paid affiliate fees.

• Actually, the advantage, I’d say, is data. More than money, a bit of which Rowling already has. Now, she gets all that ID and contact data, data, data, rich, fresh, live, crawling data on all those “suffering fans” we’re weeping for because they’ve had to, quoting Beadon again, “jump through hoops for an electronic version.”
• Make that eight copies of “an electronic version.” Those “suffering fans,” once through those dreadful hoops, get eight copies of a book. Formatted as they wish. Eight copies, count ’em, eight.
• Pottermore allows its “suffering fans” to link their eight copies up to the devices they choose (i.e. Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, etc.) to use in reading the Scriptori Potteria.
• And what departs from Pottermore, if you will, is DRM-free. If you get an ePub version, it will be watermarked. A digital watermark might, for example, indicate that your copy was uploaded to a pirate site. But is not the same as DRM.
• DRM goes onto a Pottermore book only when it is formatted for you by, say, Amazon for your Kindle, B&N for your Nook, etc. — not by Pottermore but when it’s “wrapped” for you by the company behind your selected device.
• In case you’ve heard confusing language saying that Pottermore was “asking” retailers to DRM copies, a bit of info from Jones on a private e-mail chain will help you. I’m quoting him here with his permission:

It is right that Pottermore requested that DRM be applied to these files, but that was because they (Pottermore) never touch the file and can therefore not watermark them. This applies to all those partners, including Google and Sony.

And that’s as far as I need to go on the tech issues because there’s so much out there. At my last check, a Google search gave me 1,019 news hits on Pottermore.

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Note Laura Hazard Owen on paidContent with Pottermore, Day 2: Here Come The Complaints. She enumerates some of the inevitable nay-saying that follows a coup of this order.

One qualm about Pottermore in her list holds water. It was first mentioned first to me by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez and then written up well in ‘Pottermore’ Breaks All Retailers and Rules (Except Apple’s and Region Restrictions) by Tim Carmody at Wired. JK Rowling’s site won’t sell you the original British versions of her books if you’re in the States. As Carmody stresses:

I can buy or borrow the U.S. versions of the Harry Potter books anywhere. I can’t get the U.K. versions, the ones the author wrote, at the author’s own site…Even the most radical, tectonic-plate-shifting experiments in digital publishing are still part and parcel of the world of books we’ve inherited: its assumptions, its economics, and its encumbrances.

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I’d also recommend Mathew Ingram’s assessment from about 3 p.m. ET on Tuesday. By that time, much good info was in place, and he made a stable assessment of the action: What book publishers should learn from Harry Potter at GigaOm.

While not casting the question as a pivot with Amazon as Shatzkin does, Ingram gets us to the same basic question: how long will our publishers chatter on about piracy when, as Brian O’Leary would surely remind us (see A Pirate’s Dilemma), abundance, not limitations, is what wins the day?

You get eight copies in any formats you like from Pottermore when you buy a book. Here lies abundance.

They never were dumb, those Brits.

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Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.