Harry Potter has become a favorite series for so many people, myself, two of my daughters, my Dad, my great Uncle Jo … we all just loved reading the entire series. I was actually completely obsessed when I read it because I didn’t read it as it came out, book by book years apart. Instead I read it book after book, back to back, after the whole series had been published, watching each movie right after I read each book. Late nights, sore eyes and total immersion!
The Harry Potter series is to be distributed by OverDrive with proprietary DRM enabled. The reach of the agreement will see digital copies available for loan in public and school libraries in over 20 languages.
“Through local public library and school catalogues, OverDrive’s digital book lending service will promote to new and returning readers a popular way to access the official Harry Potter eBooks and digital audiobooks. The Harry Potter series has sold over 400 million copies worldwide and is widely credited with immersing an entire generation of young readers into books and reading. With this agreement, the seven books in the series will be available in digital formats for the first time for lending from public and school libraries.”
The distribution of such popular eBooks for lending via a distribution leader like OverDrive reminds me of how massive the eBook industry really is. Fairly often I come across opinion that self-publishing of eBooks is polluting the publication stream and making eBooks illegitimate and second rate. That sort of thought completely disregards the huge deals going on with eBooks. eBook publishing is a distribution method for self-published authors and the most well known authors of our time like Rowling, and the proliferation of eBooks across libraries is really quite staggering.
