VentureBeat, By Tom Cheredar: While several publishers are fighting to keep their collection of ebooks out of library lending programs, its nice to see that the series of Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling isn’t among them. Pottermore, the company that manages the Harry Potter digital books in partnership with Sony, announced that it’s reached a deal today to bring the eBook collection to over 18,000 public and school libraries across the world. The Harry Potter distribution deal is with OverDrive, which powers the majority of
eBook lending programs for public libraries across the country as well as Amazon’s Kindle eBook lending feature. The company will be in charge of hosting and digital distribution for all seven Potter book in over 20 different languages. Previously, large publishers like HarperCollins and Penguin decided to yank all e-booksfrom any book sharing service that used the OverDrive lending system due to concerns that lending would lead to increased piracy. Others, however, speculate that these decisions were made because big publishers don’t consider lending services to be a productive way to raise revenue from e-book sales. Having sold over 400 million copies of its books to date, Pottermore isn’t worried about sales lagging due to lending programs. The news likely means more schools will include the Harry Potter series of books within curriculum. (Now we just need to replace old text books with tablets and we’re good to go.) Source: VentureBeat
