J.K. Rowling to sell Harry Potter e-books directly through interactive fan site

In the lead-up to today’s much anticipated announcement from J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter fans had been told not to expect a new novel in the series, but that didn’t stop fevered speculation otherwise. While those still holding out hope for an eighth Harry Potter instalment may have been disappointed by today’s revelation, Rowling’s plans to launch a website containing troves of previously unpublished material are sure to have others salivating.

Most fans will have to wait until October 1 to access Pottermore, an interactive website containing 18,000 words of new material delving into the minutiae of the Harry Potter universe, but the first million users who register on July 31 – Harry Potter’s birthday – are being promised early access. At a press conference this morning in London, Rowling said the website will also include social media elements, allowing users to interact with each other. As quoted in the Guardian:

“I wanted to give something back to the fans that have followed Harry so devotedly over the years, and to bring the stories to a new generation,” Rowling revealed. “I hope fans and those new to Harry will have as much fun helping to shape Pottermore as I have. Just as I have contributed to the website, everyone else will be able to join in by submitting their own comments, drawings and other content in a safe and friendly environment. Pottermore has been designed as a place to share the stories with your friends as you journey through the site.”

The publishing world will no doubt closely monitor Rowling’s success in adapting the Harry Potter universe to the largely untested (save for certain examples) medium of the Web. Even more significant is the decision to begin selling e-books of the novels, which so far exist only in print, directly through the website (with technical support by e-book vendor OverDrive), bypassing established retailers. The digital editions will appear in ePub (meaning they will be compatible with all e-readers), with Rowling’s U.K. and U.S. publishers – Bloomsbury and Scholastic, respectively – receiving a cut. From the Guardian:

“It means we can guarantee people everywhere are getting the same experience,” said Rowling, of her decision to go it alone. “[I am] lucky to have the resources to do it myself and am therefore able to do it right. It’s a fantastic and unique experience which I could afford in every sense. There was really no other way to do it.”

Until recently Rowling had been reluctant to release the Potter novels as e-books, but she said that after downloading and reading an e-book for the first time she had a change of heart.

“It is my view that you can’t hold back progress. E-books are here to stay. Personally I love print and paper [but] very very recently for the first time I downloaded an e-book and it is miraculous, for travel and for children. So I feel great about taking Harry potter into this new medium,” Rowling said.

Harry Potter, Dan Brown dominate U.K. list of best-selling books

The stereotype has it that England is filled with recondite literati ensconced in mahogany-lined libraries reading leather-bound volumes of Romantic poetry and plump Victorian novels. This as compared to the beer-swilling philistines in America, gorging themselves on a diet of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy (if they read at all). Well, newly released data indicates that this conception is flawed. Readers in the U.K., it would seem, have every bit as much devotion to Dan Brown as their counterparts across the Atlantic.

As noted in the Guardian over the weekend, Brown took the number one spot on Neilsen Bookscan’s list of the U.K.’s best-selling books released since the company began collecting data in 1998. According to the service, which tracks 90 per cent of book purchases in the U.K., The Da Vinci Code moved 4,522,025 units between 1998 and 2010, which accounted for a staggering £22,857,837.53 in revenue. Angels and Demons, Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code, took the fourth spot on the list, with 3,096,850 units sold, accounting for sales of £15,537,324.84.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the top 10 is devoted to Harry Potter: all seven of J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard are featured, with the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, taking the number two spot. The only place in the top 10 not devoted to Brown or Rowling goes to Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight, which clocks in at number nine. In fact, one has to make it to number 13 before a title by an author not among the three already mentioned appears: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Perhaps surprisingly, Stieg Larsson does not crop up on the list until number 17, although the three novels in the Swedish author’s Millennium Trilogy came in at numbers one, two, and three respectively on the list of U.K. bestsellers for 2010.

Plagiarism charges continue to dog J.K. Rowling

Those pesky plagiarism charges facing J.K. Rowling just won’t go away. In 2004, the Harry Potter author was accused of lifting from a little-known 1987 book, The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, by U.K. author Adrian Jacobs. While the charges appear to be without merit, the case is now more likely to go to court after a British judge refused to dismiss the suit against Rowling. From The New York Times’ Arts Beat blog:

Mr. Jacobs’s estate has said that Ms. Rowling’s fourth book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, published in 2000, took plot lines from the Willy the Wizard book. Ms. Rowling has vehemently denied the accusation, saying that she had not heard of Mr. Jacobs, who died in 1997, until the copyright claim was made in 2004 and had not read his book. A judge overseeing the case in Britain agreed that the assertions by Mr. Jacobs’s estate are “improbable” but refused to dismiss the suit. Ms. Rowling’s American publisher, Scholastic, said it considers the assertions to be “completely without merit.”

No to dead-parent narration?

Generations of pre-J.K. Rowling books described kids acting (mostly) without adult supervision. Among other KidLit classics, characters from Peter Pan, Pippi Longstocking, and The Chronicles of Narnia often had at least one missing parent.

But Leila Sales, a children’s book editor at Penguin Young Readers Group, is speaking out against the ever-growing “ol’ dead dad syndrome” in KidLit. In a Publishers Weekly column, Sales describes the approach as “lazy writing,” offering a quasi-Oscar Wilde quote: “‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a parent in nearly every children’s book looks like lazy writing.’ (I assume that is what Wilde meant.).”

Sales argues that by killing off parents, authors decrease the number of characters, make readers instantly sympathetic, and avoid boring adult subjects. Later she writes:

Dead parents will always have their place in children’s literature. If your book is set at an orphanage, then I would hope you include a lot of dead parents. Or if a book is about a teen coping with the recent death of her mother, then, you know, her mother should have recently died. But when authors omit parents for the sake of convenience, I take issue — as an editor, and as a reader. Because a convenient story is not the same as a good story.

Bookmarks: J.K. Rowling tweets, Dr. Seuss raps, and Charles Dickens fights pirates

Bookish links from around the Web:

• Douglas Coupland really wants you to name his new Toronto park, and Scott Feschuk wants you to name his dog
• J.K. Rowling is now on Twitter, The Huffington Post reports, but she follows no one and has only three tweets. The billionaire author has 49,570 followers despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to comprehend what a tweet is
• Dr. Seuss’ Fox in Sox gets the beat box treatment. As Scope Notes says, “If you knew that Dr. Seuss invented the word ‘crunk,’ then this will seem like a natural combination”
• Charles Dickens: writer, social reformer … pirate fighter? It’s not what you think
• In honour of Banned Books Week in the U.S., here’s an interactive map of books that have been challenged and banned in a country that prides itself on freedom of speech (apparently, people still have an issue with gay penguins). The American Library Association also has a video to help children understand what Banned Book Week means 
• The Telegraph finds 50 factual errors in Dan Brown’s best-selling novels

It’s witchcraft! Bush White House said no to J.K. Rowling

ThinkProgress has been excerpting juicy bits from Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor, a memoir by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer. The most recent concerns the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which, though always political to some degree, was made nakedly so during the Bush years. (Another Bush speechwriter apparently objected to the idea of awarding the medal to the cancer-stricken Ted Kennedy on the grounds that the longtime senator was “a liberal.”)

But it wasn’t always politics that animated medal discussions: sometimes, the objections to potential candidates were a little more… medieval.  According to Latimer’s book, some people in the White House did not like the idea of giving one to J.K. Rowling “because the Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft.”

There’s a lot that could be said about this, but perhaps we should give the last word to a man who was awarded the medal in 1985:

Bookmarks: Frank McCourt, Yann Martel, Tom Wolfe, Harry Potter, and more

Some book-related links:

• Frank McCourt dies at 78.
• Yann Martel’s new novel gets a U.S. deal.
• Tom Wolfe says, “To the moon, America, to the moon…”
• Harry Potter books “very Talmudic.”
• What’s wrong with the Hugo shortlist?
• Leave Hemmingway aloooooone!!!
• Five laws of the novelist.

Harry Potter and the … Adventures of Willy the Wizard?

When you’re richer than the Queen, you’re bound to attract some money-hunting crazies. J.K. Rowling and her publisher Bloomsbury  are rejecting “unfounded, unsubstantiated, and untrue” plagiarism claims from the estate of author Adrian Jacobs, which has filed a lawsuit accusing Rowling of borrowing ideas for her Harry Potter series.

The lawsuit claims that the fourth novel in Rowling’s series (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) copied elements from Jacobs’ 1987 book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard – No. 1 Livid Land. According to the suit, some of these similar elements include a wizard competition and wizards using trains as a mode of transportation. From the CBC:

“Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest, which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures,” the suit says.

In its defense, Bloomsbury described Jacobs’ book as “a very insubstantial booklet running 36 pages, which had a very limited distribution. The central character of Willy The Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school.” A statement released yesterday also added that Rowling “had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy The Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004, almost seven years after the publication of the first book in the highly publicized Harry Potter series.”

Tintin, The Hobbit and Goosebumps: coming soon to a theatre near you: UPDATED

The imminent end of the Harry Potter film franchise – the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II is scheduled for release in 2011 – has Hollywood types scurrying to secure other family friendly literary properties to fill the looming void . Steven Spielberg is working on a film version of the popular Tintin books, and Peter Jackson Guillermo del Toro is directing an adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Other YA fare currently on Hollywood’s radar include R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series of ’tween horror stories and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

The Times reports:

All the movie studios are hunting for existing properties with tested concepts — at least as books — that can be turned into films, though none exist on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” with its more than 400 million copies in print and vast cultural footprint.

But the films must hit a sweet spot that is deceptively difficult to find: They can’t skew too young or too old. And the marketing must clearly tell parents what to expect, studio executives say.

That elusive crossover appeal is what the studios most crave according to Alan Horn of Warner Bros., also quoted in the Times article: “There’s an attraction to having global interest and appeal to as many quadrants as possible, male and female, young and old.”

Quillblog isn’t sure which is more distressing: the ongoing infantalization of our culture, or the fact that, as audiences, we’re now being slotted into “quadrants.”

There’s no word yet about an adaptation of One True Bear, which might make for an interesting property should Eli Roth ever decide to branch out into children’s movies.

UPDATE: Quillblog’s nerd-o-meter apparently failed with the above post. It has been pointed out that Guillermo del Toro is directing the film version of The Hobbit, and Peter Jackson is producing. Quillblog regrets the error.

Arrr! J.K. Rowling and John Grisham fall victim to pirates

Two of the planet’s bestselling authors, J.K. “I’ll kick Stephenie Meyer’s ass” Rowling and John Grisham, are among several authors whose books have apparently been illegally uploaded to a San Francisco-based website that promotes itself as “YouTube for books.” Scribd.com was launched by a couple of twentysomething Harvard students, and has since become an attraction for a reported 55 million visitors each month. While the site boasts a number of legal uses – the Obama campaign used it to upload policy material and thereby sidestep media filters – it now looks to have succumbed to the “Napster effect,” whereby copyrighted works are uploaded without permission and distributed for free.

An article in The Times online reports:

A search of Scribd by The Times yesterday found copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Ken Follett’s most recent novel World Without End among many bestselling titles, raising fears that the piracy affecting the music industry may have spread to books.

When presented with a list of links to various Harry Potter books, Neil Blair, J. K. Rowling’s lawyer at the Christopher Little literary agency, said that Scribd did not have permission “and what you have identified are infringing listings which we were aware of and actioning”.

The online culture of disseminating information online for free (Quillblog finds it interesting that the word “crib” appears in Scribd’s name) has also been taken on recently by The Globe and Mail‘s Peter Scowen. Scowen writes that the culture of “free” threatens the traditional means by which authors and other content creators earn their living, which seems irrefutable, but it’s open to debate as to whether the solution is to rage against the machine or try to adapt traditional methods of doing business to the new reality.

Scowen’s specific target is the upcoming Book Summit, “Giving It Away: Books, Business, and the Culture of Free.” The conference, sponsored by Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council, is an opportunity for publishers, writers, booksellers, and other interested parties to “learn about the opportunities, the pitfalls, the marketing techniques, the delivery methods, the creators, the readers” that can be tapped by properly utilizing the “culture of free.” The cost of the summit is $145.