I have been waiting for Harry Potter to be available on the Kindle since I first heard about the concept of an eBook and this crazy device from Amazon. I understood that JK Rowling wanted to do it properly, in her way, but the waiting wasn’t good for me.

The Harry Potter books that I already own are some of the very few that I have kept hold of. I didn’t think I would want to read the physical copies again - reading a real book is such an odd experience these days! - but I didn’t want to get rid of them in case they really never did appear in digital form.

The issue that I had with that, and I may have written about this before, is that I only own six of them. Six of the seven. There was no point buying the seventh because I would be just throwing money away. So, I waited. With an incomplete collection. It made me very uncomfortable, even though they are not on prominent display anywhere.

Regardless, Ms Rowling has solved the issue and my life can be complete once more. The Harry Potter books are finally available for the reading device of your choice. She hasn’t made it as simple as it could be, but it’s still good enough. You go to the Pottermore strange web thing, ignore the fact that it has been in private beta forever and click on the Shop. Buy the books (if you want all seven, there’s a pretty good discount), and then once you own them, you can connect them to your chosen reader at the click of a button. For me, that’s the Kindle.

What I find fascinating about this process is that a) I don’t understand what Amazon get out of promoting such a deal, except they get to say you can read HP on the device, I suppose and b) they’ve made it sound so complicated! Amazon’s help document about getting the books onto your device is really quite scary, and actually, it just needed to be two sentences like those I have written above.

It’s also intriguing to me that Rowling has done no such deal with the iBookstore. You can get your books on there, but only as an un-DRMed document, rather than a “send to device” option. I assume she didn’t want to agree to the 30% Apple would take from every purchase, which is her prerogative. Either that, or she tried to get her book through to the store and found the Apple process so flippin’ awful that she gave up.

(That may or may not be a personal opinion and may or may not be a story for another time.)

All that’s left to say is that I’ve been waiting for a long time to have the Kindle look like that, and I can’t wait to re-read the books.

Right after I’ve finished War and Peace.