Pottermore has partnered with Kobo to make the Harry Potter e-books available on Kobo devices.
As with Pottermore’s other retail agreements, the e-books aren’t sold directly through Kobo. Instead, Kobo’s website (which for some reason is currently illustrated with a picture of the Harry Potter books on the iPad) points users to Pottermore. They buy the e-books there and then link their Pottermore account to their Kobo account.
Pottermore has similar arrangements with Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Google. Pottermore hasn’t reached an agreement with Apple yet.
“Kobo is an increasingly powerful player in the e-reading market and we are delighted to have them on board,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in a statement.
(Speaking of Kobo becoming increasingly powerful: Kobo’s parent company, Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten, also announced a $ 100 million investment in popular image-sharing site Pinterest yesterday.)
The news comes a week after Amazon announced that it will make all of the Harry Potter e-books available free to Kindle-owning Amazon Prime members in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
- Forecast: the evolution of the e-book market
- Exploring the new frontiers of social reading
