• Wired, Wednesday, March 28, 2012 11:54 AM

Follows several delays, Harry Potter has finally been available in e-book edition. Remarkably, however, if consumers try to find J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series at Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s Web site, they will be instructed to buy the e-books elsewhere. “Instead of being sold through the retailers and their devices, or even through the publishers, all sales are made through a site owned and branded by the author,” Wired.com reports. “Harry Potter is the only publishing brand big enough (so far) to break all the rules about how e-bookstores work.”

Rowling and Pottermore apparently convinced retailers to digitally support the books with device syncing, bookmarks and other features that are usually only provided to books sold through the retailers’ own sites. “This is the first time Amazon and B&N have driven customers off their platform to another site, and then given the ability to push that content back to their device,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne told TheBookseller.com.

As Wired notes, “The only major holdout in the United States is Apple, which insists all titles sold through iBooks use the agency model in order to sell and support Rowling’s books.” Redmayne, however, still hopes to work out an agreement with Apple -- ideally by the time the interactive Pottermore fan site finally launches to the general public.

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