Harry Potter Books (Spoiler Alert--Enter at your own risk!)

[4Katie]

Does anyone know why J.K. Rowling has such an aversion to ebooks? I'm dying to read the Harry Potter series again, but can't deal with those big hardback books due to arthritis. When I read on my Kindle, I'm reading words on a page, just like a book. Why does she think it's so different?

[Kathy]

She will not allow ebooks. Wish she would, but she just doesn't think it is right.

[rho]

I keep clicking on the I want this book on Kindle - I figure that if enough people do it enough times the publisher will put tons of pressure on her and she will have to give in --  hey the publishers want to make more money from sales even if she doesn't 

[Forster]

She will not allow ebooks. Wish she would, but she just doesn't think it is right.

The ironic thing is her books are probably some of the most pirated out there.  She might as well allow ebooks so those who won't pirate have a legitimate way to both read the e-versions and compensate her for them.

[Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake']

The pitiful excuses she has given are:

a)  She doesn't want them pirated ... waaay too late for that
b)  She wants kids to have the experience of holding an actual book in their hands ... So how many kids does she think own e-readers?  Just put it out for Sony and Kindle and that pretty much solves that problem.

I love the potter series, but in the last few years, I've lost a lot of respect for JKR as a person, especially after her lawsuit against The Lexicon. 

[Leslie]

I love the potter series, but in the last few years, I've lost a lot of respect for JKR as a person, especially after her lawsuit against The Lexicon. 

Yes, she really came across as a bully in that situation. I also got annoyed with her and the whole "Dumbledore is gay" debacle.

L

[Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake']

Yes, she really came across as a bully in that situation. I also got annoyed with her and the whole "Dumbledore is gay" debacle.

L

It added absolutely nothing to the character.  Kids think it's neat to ask that question, and too many people answer "yes" without thinking.  It recently happened to a friend of my GS and now it's all over the place that he's gay.  He's only 11 years old. 

This is an adult issue and has no place in children's literature ... even though many adults read and love Harry. 

[LisaW.]

Yes, she really came across as a bully in that situation. I also got annoyed with her and the whole "Dumbledore is gay" debacle.
L

I totally agree. I understand that these are her characters and creations, and she knows much more about them than the reader does (and she has the right to do whatever she wants with them). However, there was no scene or reference that made anyone even question if Dumbledore was gay or not. So why did she have to make a point of it after the series was completed? It does not matter.

What's truly sad is that now future generations will be reading this amazing series of books about a boy wizard; and they may unconsciously (or consciously) look for scenes that acknowledge that Dumbledore is gay. When it shouldn't matter or have any bearing on the story.

And if JKR has come out and said things about her characters that never were acknowledged in her books, what's to stop other authors from doing the same thing? Some readers are going to feel betrayed if the authors start changing their perceptions of the characters they love.

[Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake']

What's truly sad is that now future generations will be reading this amazing series of books about a boy wizard; and they may unconsciously (or consciously) look for scenes that acknowledge that Dumbledore is gay. When it shouldn't matter or have any bearing on the story.

The HP forum I frequented for three years picked apart every single sentence of every single book.  Not one of the kids or adults ever even hinted that they found anything that remotely suggested that Dumbledore was gay.  They do, however, follow Dumbledore's philosophy of life in their own lives. 

And if JKR has come out and said things about her characters that never were acknowledged in her books, what's to stop other authors from doing the same thing? Some readers are going to feel betrayed if the authors start changing their perceptions of the characters they love.

She also contradicted herself several times after the release of Book 7.  That's why I don't allow anything that she says after Book 7 to be used as cannon in my HP book club.  She doesn't seem to be able to keep track of things, which is why she used The Lexicon when she forgot timelines, etc., and then turned around in court and accused Steve Van DerArk of sloppy work. 

She even forgot to mention Ron's eye color in the books until "alert readers" brought it up.  I would hate for anyone to put my work under such intense scrutiny, but if you're going to be a mega-bucks author, you owe it to your readers to be scrupulous in your writing. 

[Leslie]

The HP forum I frequented for three years picked apart every single sentence of every single book.  Not one of the kids or adults ever even hinted that they found anything that remotely suggested that Dumbledore was gay.  They do, however, follow Dumbledore's philosophy of life in their own lives. 

To be honest, all of the teachers seemed sort of asexual. There was no mention of any of them being married, having partners, having children, etc. All the parents followed very traditional roles -- getting married, having children, sending them to school -- and the teachers were...teachers, who didn't seem to have any life outside of school. I have no problem with any of this because it's a pretty traditional formula in children's literature. That's why making Dumbledore gay, after the fact --and as you said, Gertie, when there was absolutely no evidence to support that -- bugged me so much. It was cheap trick. It made me feel like she had been reading HP slash/fanfic and thought she could tap into that group of readers, or something.

L

[robertlc]

All the Potter books have already been scanned into the PDF format.

[mlewis78]

The gay Dumbledore theory only came up when someone asked her a question about his love life at the event at Carnegie Hall.  Didn't bother me at all.  The book doesn't give it away one way or the other.  It's what her concept of him was when she wrote it but she didn't feel any need to put that into the book -- that's just fine with me.  The media picked it up and ran away with it.

I wasn't pleased with the lawsuit and I wanted to buy the printed Lexicon myself.  Also hate that she won't allow ebooks.  There are so many adults reading her work.

[Vegas_Asian]

I didn't know she had a lawsuit issue with Lexicon. Used to lurk there once upon a time. Still disappointed she doesn't allow her series to be released in ebook format. seen them online. They aren't hard to find for download, but I prefer to hope she changes her mind before I dl.

[Leslie]

I didn't know she had a lawsuit issue with Lexicon. Used to lurk there once upon a time. Still disappointed she doesn't allow her series to be released in ebook format. seen them online. They aren't hard to find for download, but I prefer to hope she changes her mind before I dl.

If you can type G-O-O-G-L-E, you can find the HP books online. It's not hard and you don't even need to know what a torrent is.

What she did to that poor Lexicon librarian was shameful. Her lawyer hammered the guy on the witness stand like he was a murderer or something. Reduced him to tears. I lost a ton of respect for her after that incident.

L

[Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake']

What she did to that poor Lexicon librarian was shameful. Her lawyer hammered the guy on the witness stand like he was a murderer or something. Reduced him to tears. I lost a ton of respect for her after that incident.

L

On top of which, she demanded pre-approval of his current book. 

I wasn't pleased with the lawsuit and I wanted to buy the printed Lexicon myself. 

Here it is.  They settled the suit.  It's greatly reduced in content because of her demands.



I bought two copies.  One for myself and one I gave as a prize to the winner of my HP tri-wizard tournament. (Gryffindor won, but Slytherin won the house cup)

[Scheherazade]

Rowling has all but run me off from the series with her attitude toward several things.  She's proven she cares more about her silly paper fetish than the people who are feeding it by buying her books.  It's one thing to refuse to write on anything but paper, but she even blogged that book 7 (I think) was late to the publisher because she had to run around London all day looking for paper and none of the stores she went to had it.  Then there was the interview that made me think she doesn't even enjoy what she's doing where she said she has to get herself drunk to even want to sit down and write to which everyone applauded her for being a real person... but is that really something we want a children's writer promoting in an interview?

Then there's the whole thing about her aversion to fantasy, making it sound like a genre she wants nothing to do with and considers herself better than.  But even on this she's flip-flopped, saying in one interview that she loved the Narnia books as a child and would pick them up again in a second if one was in the room with her, then later saying she never finished Narnia or Lord of the Rings and lambasting them for their contrived fantasy plots and how she wrote the Harry Potter books to subvert the fantasy genre.  This statement was again after her saying that she didn't even realize she was writing a fantasy book... so she was trying to subvert a genre that it apparently never even occurred to her that she was writing about.  I guess the centaurs, unicorns, phoenixes, talking hats, moving photos, wizards, trolls, magic wands, gnomes, flying cars, giants, owls delivering mail, etc, etc, etc, didn't tip her off.

I absolutely loved the Harry Potter books.  I have to admit hearing about all the deaths in her last book made me not buy it and I put off reading it, but her stance on electronic books and then researching it more and finding out all these other things has just really turned me off of her period.  I might buy that last book, but only if she releases it for the Kindle.  I don't even feel like it's worth pirating her stuff even though that's what she's driving otherwise honest people to do who would buy all of her books for second and third times if only she allowed them to.  I haven't pirated a book yet and I'm not going to start just because of her.

[Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake']

Sheherezade, where did you read all those things about JKR?  I've read a lot of her interviews, but never anything like that. 

[Scheherazade]

I'll see if I can find them again and post quotes. (edit: I found them)  Okay, it was getting drunk to sleep at night, not to write, but was a side effect of said writing.  Got a bit mixed up there, but still... smoking and drinking aren't something you want a beloved children's fantasy writer to joke about doing in an interview with Time.

The following are from the Time article at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1083935-2,00.html in which the writer of the article says that the fantasy genre is "an idealized, romanticized, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves."

"Goblet--oh, my God. That was the period where I was chewing Nicorette. And then I started smoking again, but I didn't stop the Nicorette. And I swear on my children's lives, I was going to bed at night and having palpitations and having to get up and drink some wine to put myself into a sufficient stupor."

"The most popular living fantasy writer in the world doesn't even especially like fantasy novels. It wasn't until after Sorcerer's Stone was published that it even occurred to her that she had written one. "That's the honest truth," she says. "You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that's what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy." Rowling has never finished The Lord of the Rings. She hasn't even read all of C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels, which her books get compared to a lot. There's something about Lewis' sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves. "There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex," Rowling says. "I have a big problem with that."

"I was trying to subvert the genre," Rowling explains bluntly. "Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does not make his world better significantly. The relationships make his world better. Magic in many ways complicates his life."

I couldn't find the actual blog again, but this is a reaction to her paper blog http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=512061 where fans sent her deluges of paper so her next book wouldn't be late as well.

Oh, and did I mention her fans somehow got it in their minds that TERRY PRATCHETT stole Unseen University from Hogwarts despite the fact his books were published years before hers?  Needless to say after months of harassing and even threatening emails and not so well wishers on the street he got pretty irked and then he saw this Times article.  He lambasted the writer of the article for his uneducated musings on the fantasy genre and Rowling took it as an attack against her that started a bit of a war going back and forth, which of course her community called him a bitter old man over.  One of the leading writers of fantasy still alive today and they treated him like that.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4732385.stm  This is the original news story.  The media made it out to be him attacking her and it was turned around on him saying things like that he "complained that the status of Harry Potter author JK Rowling is being elevated "at the expense of other writers"."

http://www.wizardnews.com/story.20050802.html  This is his open letter in response to the attacks against him based on people taking the article as an attack on her.

[VictoriaP]

...how she wrote the Harry Potter books to subvert the fantasy genre.  This statement was again after her saying that she didn't even realize she was writing a fantasy book... so she was trying to subvert a genre that it apparently never even occurred to her that she was writing about.  I guess the centaurs, unicorns, phoenixes, talking hats, moving photos, wizards, trolls, magic wands, gnomes, flying cars, giants, owls delivering mail, etc, etc, etc, didn't tip her off.

ROFLMAO!

Her "silly paper fetish" doesn't even make sense when you think about it--she's let them make audiobooks of her stuff.

And you're not missing anything by not reading the last book.  The first three were fabulous, from there they became bloated and lost all the charm she'd created in the earlier books.  When I go reread them, I get to Goblet of Fire & nearly always stop because she takes a story she could have told in 300 pages & drags it out along fairly predictable lines for eons.

It's obnoxious of me, but I'll admit I'm tempted to take pirated copies of her stuff just to spite her & her errant nonsense about ebooks.  I've paid for hardcovers of the whole HP series, and if she's not interested in taking my money to replicate them on my Kindle, I can't say I see much reason to wait for her to change her mind.  But there are enough other, better written books in that genre to legally read that it's not been worth my time to even bother tracking them down.

[CS]

If you can type G-O-O-G-L-E, you can find the HP books online. It's not hard and you don't even need to know what a torrent is.

It is ridiculously simple. As an experiment, I wanted to see how easily they were to find. Five minutes later, they were all on my drive and I had the first one already converted to Kindle format. I didn't put it on the Kindle or do anything else with it after like that. Like I said, it was just an experiment and I'm happy to wait for the legal versions. But if Rowling doesn't support e-books because she's concerned about piracy, she's an idiot.

[jmiked]

And you're not missing anything by not reading the last book.  The first three were fabulous, from there they became bloated and lost all the charm she'd created in the earlier books.

Agreed.

Edit: In retrospect, I'd amend my comment: The first three were great, thereafter they were merely very good. It's probably something to do with the newness of the series wearing off.


Mike

[Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake']

Agreed.


Mike

Disagreed.   

[PJ]

How can someone say they are apposed to ebooks because they think children should have the experience of holding a book, as if you would give a child a Kindle <humph>, and then turn around and make movies of the books?  They most certainly watch movies and are quite likely to choose the movie over the book.  What a load of manure.

[Vegas_Asian]

How can someone say they are apposed to ebooks because they think children should have the experience of holding a book, as if you would give a child a Kindle <humph>, and then turn around and make movies of the books?  They most certainly watch movies and are quite likely to choose the movie over the book.  What a load of manure.

good point. Its true. know people like that. (the same people that call me to fill in the gaps of the movie they don't understand)

[Scheherazade]

I failed to mention the bit where she said she's read and re-read and will continue to re-read the CS Lewis books if given the chance, long before she decided to say she's never even finished the series in the interview I posted above.

Here are just a few of the bits where she's contradicted herself.  It just feels like she's doing her best to make it seem like Harry Potter wasn't inspired by anything and she did it all on her own.  There's no shame in a writer being inspired and if I'm lucky enough to be as famous as her I will still give credit where it's due, not just when I'm a rising star but when I reach the top as well.

From The Electronic Telegraph on July 25, 1998.  "She loved C. S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, but was not such a fan of Roald Dahl. As for the Enid Blyton books, Rowling says she read them all, but was never tempted to go back to them, whereas she would read and re-read Lewis. "Even now, if I was in a room with one of the Narnia books I would pick it up like a shot and re-read it."

From an interview in 1997 with The Sunday Times she admits it was fantasy even after just the first book.  "It had to be a boarding school to sustain the fantasy," Rowling says. "He had to go somewhere that's an enclosed world to have his adventures. Kids are incredibly powerless because everything is determined for them, so a rich fantasy life in which they do have power is almost inevitable.

Another with The Glasgow Herald in 1997.  "Yes. Absolutely. Kids are so powerless, however happy they are. The idea that we could have a child who escapes from the confines of the adult world and goes somewhere where he has power, both literally and metaphorically, really appealed to me. "It's a traditional theme: the idea of the foundling and the mysterious hidden destiny, but this concept of breaking out is a common fantasy for kids."

This from The Australian in 1998  "Fantasy is not my favourite genre. Although I love C. S. Lewis, I have a problem with his imitators." At 33, Rowling still re-reads The Chronicles of Narnia, famous for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (she likes The Voyage of the Dawn Treader best), along with other childhood favourites, E. Nesbit, Paul Gallico and Noel Streatfield. "I try to do what they did in the sense of getting a good story and telling it as well as possible," she says. "There was nothing slapdash about the way they wrote."

Rowling, who studied French and classics at Exeter University ("My parents thought I was going to be a bilingual secretary"), calls Lewis a genius. "He was a very learned man and created a very rich mythology of his own."  "Number one, I think he was a genius and I don't think I am. His world was a different place you were going through into another dimension. For me, in the Harry books it is not a different world, it's simply a world we can't see: we're muggles, it's right under our noses."