Rowling says no to e-books
2005-06-15 10:18
New York - When Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince comes out in July, children from around the world will line up at stores or wait anxiously at home or summer camp for their copy to arrive by mail.
But anyone looking to read the book online, at least legally, should not even try.
JK Rowling has not permitted any of the six Potter books to be released in electronic form, not even during the peak of the e-book craze a few years ago.
Neil Blair, a lawyer with Rowling's literary agency, would only say "this has not been an area that we have sought to licence" and did not comment directly on whether pirated e-books, a common phenomena for Potter titles, were hurting sales.
"We monitor the internet and take appropriate action," Blair says.
Rowling's choice follows an industry trend. Young people are supposedly more open to new technology, but the e-book market works in an opposite way.
Adult best sellers such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and David McCullough's 1776 are available electronically, but not books by Rowling and many other popular children's authors, including Lemony Snicket, Cornelia Funke and RL Stine.
"It's not like we haven't tried this market," says Jason Campbell, marketing director for Harper Media, a division of HarperCollins that oversees e-book distribution.
"We've done RL Stine and (Meg Cabot's) The Princess Diaries and it didn't work. Princess Diaries has been our most successful young adult series in e-books, but it pales in comparison to e-book sales for Michael Crichton."
Several reasons are cited, from authors preferring books on paper to concerns over digital piracy to competition from television and other media.
But the greatest problem is the lack of a popular reading device, a handicap that has held back the whole e-book business from the start.
"I didn't think then, and I don't think now, that there is a cool enough or interesting enough hardware to get the kids engaged," says Barbara Marcus, president of the children's books division of Rowling's US publisher, Scholastic, Inc.
"One of the fantasies I had was of kids walking around, without backpacks, and somebody would say, 'You have to read Of Mice and Men and The Red Badge of Courage. Here are the e-books.' That fantasy hasn't happened."
Kate Tentler, vice-president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Online, said she has had some success with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other works affiliated with TV shows or other media. But there have been no major breakthroughs, even when free downloads were offered for the popular Samurai Girl books.
"It didn't take off quite as much as I'd like to," she says. "The key is getting those books in front of them, and that's what we're trying to figure out."
- AP