With Pottermore, JK Rowling will lead children to a new stage in the evolution of reading ? and get them to help with the material
And it goes on. The series may have ended, but we have more Harry Potter to come, in the form of a website going by the almost nakedly self-explanatory name of Pottermore.com. We don't actually know exactly what's going to be on it. Visit the site now and all you can get, until October, is a brief video of JK Rowling as lady of the manor, sitting on a classy sofa in a muslin top and green wellies, and thanking her readers.
"No author could have asked for a more wonderful, diverse and loyal readership," she says, and you can bet she means it. (It is also a nice way of saying "no author could have asked for more readers".)
We are invited to prepare ourselves for the next stage in the Potter phenomenon: the inevitable one, perhaps, in which authorship is handed over to those readers willing to register on the site. Over a rather snazzy animation of a book's very pages turning into paper versions of various scenes ? spiders, an owl, that hat that tells the young ones which House they'll go to ? we are told to expect a "safe, unique online reading experience".
Given the lack of precise information as to what we can expect this to look like, we have to examine carefully the few words we have been given. That "safe" is interesting. One wonders what an unsafe online reading experience would be like ? and then, when you bear in mind the target age of her readership and the kind of things that a certain kind of fan likes to imagine his or her heroes getting up to in self-generated fiction, you have to concede that "safe" is a good word to use to reassure parents ? although now she's used it, you might not feel so reassured at all. Well, let us give Rowling the benefit of the doubt (and, whatever misgivings you or indeed I might have about her prose style, she has proved an exemplarily conscientious and vigilant caretaker of her own legend) and assume it will be watched like a hawk.
The other thing to note is that the site will also be the place where you will, for the first time, be able to get Potter's stories in electronic form, either read aloud or as ebooks. I have no problem with this: I think Amazon makes quite enough money as it is. Nor would one expect Pottermore to be an act of creative generosity and nothing more. (Rowling says she'll be adding some details she's been keeping up her sleeve for the last 13 years.)
But it is interesting that, as Rowling managed to get a large swath of children reading books at a time when it looked as though they weren't going to be reading anything between proper covers any more, she is now presiding over the next stage of the evolution of reading. At least if Rowling is at the helm we need not fear anything tacky, meretricious, or anti-literary in the grand scheme of things. (She is ? that word again ? safe.) And, as I once noted, her prose, at least in the earlier books, is what a 10-year-old would ideally like to be able to write him- or herself; so it's fitting that she's now getting them to do some of the work.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/23/pottermore-jk-rowling
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