ReadWriteWeb

Author J.K. Rowling unveiled the plans behind the mysterious Pottermore website this morning, and fans that were hoping for a new installment in the beloved Harry Potter series or for a wizarding MMORG may be disappointed. But for those who've been waiting to read the novels on their e-readers, good news: Pottermore will involve, in part, the release for the very first time of the Harry Potter series in a digital format.

In what's an uncommon occurrence, Rowling retained all the rights to digital copies of her books. And until now, she had not struck any deals with publishers or distributors to make the series available digitally. All that will change when Pottermore officially launches this fall.

The good folks at Humble Bundle are launching their latest project today: The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle.

I say "good folks" for a number of reasons. First, of course, it's another pay-what-you-want deal, with which Humble Bundle has had great success in the past. You set the price you want to pay for a package that includes 5 great DRM-free indie video games. "DRM-free" and "indie games" - two more reasons to like the Humble Bundle.

The news that the publisher HarperCollins would be capping the number of times a library could lend a digital copy of a book to 26 has raised concerns - yet again - about the ramifications of our rush to embrace e-books. As one librarian, Joe Atzberger writes on his blog, the new model from HarperCollins "eliminates almost all the major advantages of the item's being digital, without restoring the permanence, durability, vendor-independence, technology-neutrality, portability, transferability, and ownership associated with the physical version."

Libraries may be on the front-lines of this latest battle, one that makes it clear that issues like DRM and lending policies can have troubling repercussions. Although the HarperCollins announcement impacts just lending through libraries, librarians are quick to point out that it isn't simply their institutions that will suffer.

To that end, librarians have started issuing statements, posting an "e-book users bill of rights" to their blogs. The statement, posted in full below, addresses "the basic freedoms that should be granted to all e-book users."

Apple's e-reader app iBooks received an update last week, boasting a fairly typical set of changes: better stability, better layout, and a connection to AirPrint. But according to some reports, this latest version can cause problems for those trying to open e-books on jailbroken iPhones.

According to Social Apples, the iBooks app will no longer launch on a jailbroken phone: "Today marks a new realization for me as a jailbreaker: Apple deliberately crippled my device."

The Humble Bundle ended its second pay-what-you-want deal on Saturday. After running for just 11 days, the startup, newly backed by Y Combinator sold over $1.8 million in video games, outperforming the great success the first bundle had earlier this year.

The Humble Bundle lets customers choose the price they wanted to pay - anything from a penny up - to download a package of 5 indie video games. And even though they could have paid just a cent, the average customer spent $7.83 to download the bundle. Some companies, in order to have their names listed as top contributors on the Humble Bundle site, paid several thousand dollars for the bundle. (And for those keeping score at home, Linux users again paid twice as much as Windows users - $13.76 to $6.67.)

As e-book sales continue to grow, the bibliophiles among us are wont to ask "Hey, what about libraries?" Will we be able to check out digital versions of books from our local libraries and read them on our e-readers?

Yes, if your library uses Adobe Digital Editions for its e-books and if you have the Bluefire Reader app. The app, available for free for iPhone and iPad, allows you to access the digital version of the books you check out from your (participating) local library.

Amazon has recently touted that sales of Kindle books are outstripping those of both hardcover and paperback editions. And a Forrester forecast earlier this week gauged that the sales from e-books for 2010 would hit over $1 billion. It seems as though the market for digital literature is strong.

But according to some publishers, if libraries start lending e-books, it could serve to "undo the entire market for e-book sales." Those were the words of Stephen Page, CEO of the publisher Faber and Faber who spoke last month at a library conference in the U.K. and announced the Publisher Association's new stance on e-book lending via libraries.

New exemptions have been added to the the Digital Millenimum Copyright Act (DMCA), a U.S. copyright law that criminalized attempts to bypass copyright, access control technologies or digital rights management (DRM) measures. The exemptions now provide protections for "fair use" in several different circumstances, the most notable of which is the (now legalized!) process of jailbreaking a phone, a popular activity among iPhone owners in particular.

Amazon quietly made a major change to its Digital Text Platform last week that went largely unnoticed: Small publishers and individual authors who use the Digital Text Platform can now opt out of the Kindle's digital rights management (DRM) program. While this change only affects a relatively small number of publishers and authors for now, this move could hint at a larger change in Amazon's DRM policy. Right now, Amazon's DRM policy means that its customers can't transfer their books to a non-Kindle e-reader.

The BBC is looking to encode TV listing metadata and employ a compression algorithm to circumvent piracy, ad removal and illegal copying. According to a recent blog post by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, the group wants to get mandatory DRM onto digital TV receivers via a broadcast flag. In other words, a "public service broadcaster" wants to lessen the way we consume media by forcing manufacturers to limit product playing abilities. While open source TV services like Boxee allow users to view programs over home networks regardless of the device, a broadcast flag would force all HDTV receivers to include content protection. For those of us who watch our programs online, this could pose a serious problem.