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Pottermore adds Kobo as a Harry Potter e-book partner
Date:2012-05-21 View:

By By Laura Hazard Owen

 

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 the Pottermore store. Customers 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 to help power retail with social).

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.