Passing Thoughts: JK Rowling and Pottermore

A thought occurred to me that might shock you: JK Rowling is a bit of an ass.

I actually never finished reading the Harry Potter books and looked them up on the Kindle store, as I think it’s about time to revisit them and read them. I mean, can’t go wrong with Harry Potter, right?

Now, getting Harry Potter as a set of legal, proper ebook has literally been the electronic book equivalent of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. Everyone’s been wondering where the biggest book franchise has been, and finally the publishers have entered the digital age and relented to let us read the damn books on one of those new-fangled e-reader dealies. (They’ll never catch on, I tells ya!)

Anyway, my point is, they did release Harry Potter on ebooks – but you have to go to the overly-snazzy and totally redundant Pottermore (wtf does it even do?!) site in order to actually buy them. So instead of leveraging Amazon’s excellent storefront, payment and delivery systems… the Amazon “phoney” listings for Harry Potter instruct customers to click over to Pottermore, to create another account they’ll probably use once, and then enter their payment details across.

If this was any other book or author, Amazon would be able to tell them to stop trying to use Amazon to forward traffic to their own stupid site, and get in with every other author. But because this is Harry Potter… logic and rationalising this is out the window and pandering to JK’s every whim is in.

Since when is JK Rowling suddenly “better” then every other Kindle author? Why hold Amazon to ransom to make life a little bit more difficult for us customers?

This is nonsensical. She already has more money than most small countries off the back of this book, but for some strange reason has colluded with her publishers to make the very readers that made her a success and a new generation just getting into reading via Kindle have to jump through a completely arbitrary set of hoops. And what for? Advertising on Pottermore? Or that crappy “experience”? Please…

So screw you, JK, you giant bitch, and screw your “exclusive to Pottermore” ebooks.