iPotter's secrets unlocked for digital generation

Published on Thursday 23 June 2011 17:59

WHEN JK Rowling completed the last line of the seventh volume in her Harry Potter series, she left fans of the boy wizard wanting more.

Now that hunger is to be satisfied with the launch of an online archive of unpublished notes and details about the magical world she created.

A million lucky Harry Potter fans will get the first chance next month to dip into the archive of material cut from the original books about the boy wizard's adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The announcement came yesterday as Rowling unveiled the new Pottermore website aimed at bringing Harry's adventures to the "digital" generation.

The free website will also sell all seven Harry Potter novels as e-books for the first time when it goes live to all in October. The novels have sold more than 450 million copies but the e-books give the opportunity of reaching a new, even larger, audience.

Rowling said the website, part social-networking and part computer game, includes "information I have been hoarding for years" about the books' characters and settings as well as 18,000 words of new material.

Fans will be able to interact digitally by following Harry to Hogwarts, where they will be sorted into one of the school's rival houses and become student wizards themselves. They can shop for wands in Diagon Alley, cast spells and mix potions.

The first million fans registering following yesterday's launch will be invited to enter the site on 31 July - Harry's birthday.

Speaking at a press conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Edinburgh-based Rowling said Pottermore was about the "give-back" and that the technology now existed to do something outside the books and the films.

"I wanted to give something back to the fans that have followed Harry so devotedly over the years, and to bring the stories to a new digital generation. Just as I have contributed to the website, everyone else will be able to join in by submitting their own comments, drawings and other content in a safe and friendly environment - Pottermore has been designed as a place to share the stories with your friends as you journey through the site."

Rowling said: "I wanted to pull it back to reading, I wanted to pull it back to the literary experience, the story experience and this is what emerged."

She said some of the material for the website had been "literally" dug out of boxes.

"The world has kind of out-stripped me in the sense that back in 1998 I knew I was generating a lot more material than would ever appear in the books. I thought 'Who would ever want to know the significance of all these different wand woods?'

"This was all in my head. So at that time the only way I could imagine ever putting that material out there was in the form of a printed book."

Rowling admitted working on the website had given her a way of reconnecting with a character and universe she loved.

"It is exactly like an ex-boyfriend. Finishing writing Harry - I have only ever cried in that way, and that much, when my mother died. I have never cried for a man the way I cried for Harry Potter."Rowling's last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was published in 2007, but the author said she still had no plans for an eighth. However, she said fans might still see the publication of a Harry Potter encyclopedia, with profits going to charity.

Philip Jones, deputy editor of the Bookseller, said the new website would not deter people from reading printed books.

"I don't think it matters if the Potter books are digital or in written form. Rowling has packaged the website as an immersive reading experience."