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Via the boys at wired.com
J.K. Rowling will end a week of speculation Thursday by revealing details about her mysterious new Harry Potter-themed site, Pottermore.com.
Currently a mere holding page featuring the word Pottermore, it has had fans frantically guessing what could be in store for them. Wired.co.uk has gathered together the leading theories.
Harry Potter Encyclopedia:
Rowling has hinted that she would create a Harry Potter reference guide of sorts on a number of occasions. In 2007, she told Today’s Meredith Vieria that she “probably will” publish a Potter encyclopaedia, which would offer up details about the characters, their family trees and the fate of the wizarding world.
An unofficial encyclopedia, called the Harry Potter Lexicon, was published by RDR Books in 2007, listing characters, places, creatures, spells and magical tools. Rowling and Warner Bros. sued for copyright infringement, saying that her efforts to stop the publishing of the Lexicon had stifled her creativity. She said that she was not sure if she has “the will or the heart” to publish her own encyclopedia.
The judge ruled that the Lexicon appropriated “too much of Rowling’s creative work for its purposes as a reference guide.” The author, Steve Vander Ark, released a revised and much shorter version that was approved for publication in 2009, called The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction.
Social Network for Muggles:
The Harry Potter books have a huge fan base which gather together across a range of different fan-created platforms — such as Mugglenet, HPANA and The Leaky Cauldron. If Pottermore were a social networking site, it would unite fans in a single, author-originated destination, allowing them to meet like-minded fans and share their thoughts about the mind-bogglingly popular books and the characters and story lines within them.
By being in control of the fan base, Rowling will get all of the demographic information, e-mail addresses and other data that is conventionally held by the publisher or retailer. Not only does this mean a direct way of promoting any new initiatives to her fans, there is also the possibility for her to even take on sponsors who can promote selected partner content to the network.
Magical E-Books:
In the past, Rowling has said that she wouldn’t release the Potter stories as e-books because of concerns about online piracy and the desire for readers to experience the books on paper. However, where there’s a will there’s a way and this hasn’t stopped people from pirating the books anyway — through scanning the texts and uploading them to file sharing sites.
Since the last book was published in 2007, the e-book and e-reader industry has flourished, with a host of devices including the iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader and Nook launching. By publishing official digital versions of her books, she would offer e-book fans a legitimate and legal alternative to pirating and net a tasty profit in the process.
Interestingly it is Rowling, rather than her publishers Bloomsbury and Scholastic, who retains the rights to her e-books. When her first book was published in the mid 1990s, e-book rights wouldn’t have been a feature of publishing contracts since there wasn’t a market for them. However, these days, publishing deals will almost certainly bundle the digital rights together with print rights. I’d be surprised if her publishers didn’t fight for the digital rights when renegotiating deals for her later books — perhaps they did and her skepticism about the digital publishing marketplace was a foresighted bluff.
Harry Potter Videogame:
There are some suggestions that Pottermore could be an online game. After all, Warner Bros., which own the rights to the videogames, registered the trademark “Pottermore” in 2009, describing it as providing “multiple-user access to a global computer information network.”
There has been speculation that Pottermore stands for Potter Multiplayer Online Role-playing Experience and that visitors will be able to take part in a magical MMORPG. This would add weight to the rumors dating from 2008 that Warner Bros.-owned developer Turbine (which also build the Lord of the Rings Online experience) had been given $40 million of funding to work on a Potter MMO.
Warner Bros. already publishes a number of Harry Potter games with Electronic Arts, where the characters and scenery are designed with the same look and feel as the movies. So far, the styling of the owls that you can see on the Pottermore YouTube video countdown appear slightly different than the animations within existing games.
Another Book?
This is the least likely of the proposed theories, given that Rowling’s PR company, Stonehill Salt, has issued a statement denying that there is a new book. However, in the past, Rowling has told Oprah Winfrey that she could “definitely write an eighth, ninth and 10th book.”
Whatever it is, the timing is critical. The last movie installment of the Harry Potter franchise — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 — launches July 15. Pottermore will no doubt be able to ride on the multimillion-dollar marketing wave that precedes the movie debut.
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