J. K. Rowling [video] has announced that her much beloved Harry Potter books will go digital, on a site that has been the subject of much speculation - Pottermore.com. All seven titles will be available for any digital platform on the site, which will also serve as a social networking platform for Potter fans. The online store will open in October but users can start registering email addresses now with full registration scheduled to being on July 31 - Harry Potter's birthday.
The site also comes with such features as a Sorting Hat that sort visitors into Hogwarts houses, as well as new content related to the books.
With the rollout of Pottermore, the question is fair to ask: will the site give eBooks and eReaders for children the same boost that the original series did for reading ten years ago when the first book was published? The children's book industry is already trending in this direction, so a safe bet would be that, yes, it will.
Barnes & Noble NOOK Color Reader's Tablet just introduced several interactive children's books such as Disney Cars and Cars 2 titles and 50 "I Can Read" favorites, for example. It also introduced several new apps include some for children such as Hangman, new Dr. Seuss story apps, along with apps featuring the Berenstain Bears.
There are also independent sites offering e-reading services for children, writes Café Mom, such as Magicblox. It offers hundreds of interactive children's books on iPads and laptops for which people pay a flat fee to read as many as you want. Many of these new books, she says, have interactive elements like animations as well as "read-to-me" features.
Children's Accounts Next?
There are some changes that should be introduced if publishers and vendors are to get serious about children’s eBooks and eReaders, writes Teleread. Children's accounts, for instance. "Let's say I am a person who wants to screen the books my child reads. The simple solution would be to keep their reader registered to my own account. … But my own account comes with my own credit card. How can I turn off the one-click ordering (or, indeed, ALL on-device ordering) on a Kindle or Nook to prevent them from using it? And how do I prevent them from accessing books I bought for myself, which are not intended for them to read?"
