Pottermore

[sleigh]

So everyone, including CNN, seems to be buzzing about this 'mysterious' website that JK Rowling has put up called "Pottermore", and wondering what it is.

How is that halfway competent investigative reporters wondering about a trademarked site can't go to the US Trademark Office site and look up the trademarks and the descriptions that goes with them? How can they be so clueless?

You want to know what Pottermore is? Go here and click on the six serial numbers and read the descriptions. Then you'll know what CNN and everyone else can't seem to figure out.

Comments

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Online store... but then everyone is hoping for some new original stuff.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

While I definitely applaud your far superior investigative abilities, I'm not sure that the trademark applications tell us anything that a reasonable person couldn't have guessed.

Four of the six serial numbers shout "RETAIL STORE!"

One could be a real social-networking site, or simply a really good interactive community with threaded discussion topics.

There looks to be a portion that will likely be an interactive game--but will it be a single-player thing, or will it be a MMORPG?

How much new content will be on the site, and how often will it be updated?

I would interpret it as a deluxe dream-version of any author's website, if they had a following of tens of millions of readers (and even more who are fans of the movies). But it's the specifics that aren't obvious.

Or were the news media speculating something else? Because "oh, new big Potter-dedicated fan website" was the first thing I thought of when I heard Rowling was doing something.

[jonhansen.livejournal.com]

Your error is giving them credit to be halfway competent. Clearly, they are not.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree -- that was my thought, too. But I heard commentary on NPR about maybe there was a new book project, or maybe she was going to carry on the Potter story digitally. CNN had a silly 'article' that was all fluff: "Harry Potter fans, already an excitable bunch, are in a tizzy over a mysterious new website from series creator J.K. Rowling that hints at future Harry Potter-related content... Clicking either owl takes visitors to Rowling's YouTube channel, where a video screen counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until a Rowling "announcement" -- set for 7 a.m. ET Wednesday."

Yeah, the trademark description reads mostly as an online store, with a fan forum and a few online games dangled as bait.

But "deluxe dream-version of any author's website" is the best description yet!

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

NPI -- no penis involved

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

I heard commentary on NPR about maybe there was a new book project

-->Do people just not take her at her word, or is it because they're not fiction writers that they simply don't believe her? I guess people who aren't writers must think writers are as thirsty for new material in the same world as they (the readers) are. They don't realize that the writer lives much more closely with the books by several orders of magnitude. Each new Harry Potter book consumed two days of my life, plus large chunks of time for a few weeks after as people talked about them, plus random "it came up in conversation" time.

Rowling, OTOH, has all the time spent writing the books, plus all the touring, the discussions of subrights (a huge category) and derivatives (an even huger category--HP has a theme park for fuck's sake), and on and on and on.

Those books and everything else have consumed her life for more than a decade. So when JKR says, "Yeah, I don't think I want to write any more Harry Potter stuff, at least not for a decade," I believe her. I'm sure she's grateful for the piles of money everything has made for her, but I wouldn't blame her one bit if she's totally Pottered out.

So all the hypothesizing about it being new material seemed totally bonkers to me.

[slweippert.livejournal.com]

Yes, but where's the fun in figuring out beforehand?