We’ve waited patiently for almost a year, and now book two on Pottermore, Chamber of Secrets, is finally being opened. Chapters 1-4 went live yesterday for House Cup winners Slytherin, and today they are accessible for all other students too. Head over to Pottermore now to have a look at the new features and content by JK Rowling!

The website currently states that subsequent chapters will be available ‘shortly’.

With Pottermore making updates until the release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the Pottermore Insider recently announced that they are setting up a House Cup Tournament. As you already know, the House Cup is awarded to the house with the most house points at the end of the school year. On Pottermore, you can achieve house points through brewing potions and dueling. Here is what Pottermore said:

Pottermore students have been working hard on their potion-making and duelling skills to earn house points for their respective houses. Those points have been gathering and, with the numbers building up to impressive heights, we can now announce that the Pottermore House Cup will be awarded soon! The house with the greatest number of points will win the Pottermore House Cup, so keep up the duelling and brewing. We’ll be posting updates regarding the Pottermore House Cup both on the Insider and on the Pottermore Gateway, but also somewhere else… We’re pleased to announce that each Pottermore house now has its own noticeboard. Your house noticeboard can be found in your house’s common room on Pottermore – make sure you visit to stay up to date with the latest house news as we begin the countdown to the announcement of the Pottermore House Cup winner. It’s an exciting time; good luck to all houses!

Everyone go online and get to brewing and dueling! The House Cup will be awarded on July 5th.

I’ve had a look around and found two book excerpts located in the ‘Moment’ pictured below, titled ‘Harry Becomes An Outcast’. And there a couple more are in the ‘The Library’ and ‘Hagrid’s Secret’ moments.

Go and have a look for yourself and see what you find! Pottermore.com

Speaking to The Guardian, Redmayne insists that when released, Chamber of Secrets will be a much richer experience than book 1, which some users were a little disappointed with. From the article:

Redmayne also acknowledged issues with Pottermore’s community and promised change – although everything will continue to be moderated. “The community elements are too restrictive at the moment and we will be easing them up. Within a community, you need to be able to communicate,” he said. “In the next few weeks we will enable people to communicate more, but to do so in a completely safe environment.

The site will also become more interactive, he promised, revealing that work is currently underway on launching the second book in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “It won’t be the next couple of weeks but we’re working to get it live as soon as possible,” he said. “What is going to become a given is that there will be a lot more interaction added. When book two goes online – and we’re working on that at the moment – it will be a real step up from the stuff in book one. There’ll be more from Jo, and more interactivity. And we will grow this over the seven books – you will see it becoming a broader and broader and richer and richer experience,” he said.

Also, The Bookseller quotes some impressive figures from the CEO:

The Pottermore e-book store sold £3m-worth of Harry Potter e-books in its first month, the company’s chief executive has revealed, while the Pottermore experience, which allows fans to explore the Harry Potter universe online, added five million new users in the two weeks since its own launch on 14th April.

Charlie Redmayne said sales at the online shop, which went live on 27th March, had been driven first by pent-up demand, with the sales value high because of the number of Harry Potter fans buying the e-book bundle, priced at £38.64, a discount of 14% on the cost of buying the seven titles individually.

Redmayne said the sales had been above budget, and continued to outpace expectations.

Among many interesting points, one of the most notable things he said was that the next books after Philosopher’s Stone would be released “over the next few weeks and months”. He also says the site is “currently very limited… not amazing yet” but will get “better and better” as more books and content are made available.

Listen to the whole thing right here:

Here is a summary thanks to Hypable.com:

- Pottermore is separated into 2 parts: the Pottermore experience and the Pottermore shop.
- J.K. Rowling created a deep and broad world, and the books are only a ‘very narrow corridor’ of the world of Harry Potter.
- 97% of beta users looked at every single page of the site and content.
- Average Pottermore user spent (spends) 47 minutes on the site.
- When Charlie came on board, there was massive re-platforming that needed to be done. The site needed to adapt to the large amount of traffic it would be receiving.
- Chose the time of 8:15am GMT to open the site very quietly, with most of America and UK still in bed on a Saturday morning. The CEO had a quick chat with the booksellers, then let the press-release go out.
- New books in line over the next few weeks and months.
- Fans mostly come to the site to read J.K. Rowling’s new content
- A lot more functionalities – like wizard dueling – are to come
- Over the next few weeks they will be switching their focus from platform issues to content issues, in which the site is going to get ‘incredibly exciting’ and his job will become ‘much more exciting’. He also commented that the site will get ‘better and better and better’
- Over the coming weeks you will see more of J.K. Rowling’s content and books ‘fly by’
- New interactives and community functionalities will be added in the coming weeks as well.
- Redmayne commented that he although he thought Pottermore isn’t amazing yet like the books, films and games are, the site needs to be amazing, and shall be.
- Could be seeing ‘enhanced’ ebooks coming down the line in the next year. Redmayne wants the shop to become the ‘essential hub for all things Harry Potter’
- He is constantly thinking about a digital future for Harry Potter on all platforms – tablets, phones, etc. He thinks that they should be thinking about what they can do on Facebook and YouTube

Also, it was announced today that the official Harry Potter e-books, sold only via Pottermore, are now available in more languages – German, Italian, Spanish and French.

Up to now only a million beta testers had been able to access the website, which provides an interactive Harry Potter reading experience with lots of new written content from JK Rowling.

But now they have made all necessary technical upgrades and a few visible changes (including sounds), everyone who was left out of the beta can now experience the magic for themselves.

We also hope they’ll release more books soon, as currently only Book 1 is available. Watch a sneak peek clip of Pottermore below:

Courtesy of TheBookSeller, Redmayne calculated some total figures surrounding the e-book sales:

The number means that the digital versions of the Harry Potter titles may have out-sold their print equivalents during that launch week. According to Nielsen BookScan, the seven Harry Potter print books brought in £36,000 in sales across bookshops that week, with total spending on the books so far this year at £588,000, but the worldwide figure would be much bigger. In the UK in 2011 the backlist titles brought in sales of £4m, from sales of 530,000 individual books sold. In the US Nielsen BookScan measured 1.6m units of the Potter books sold in 2011. Redmayne said: “We had budgeted for a much lower figure, I had looked at the physical sales of the books, and tried to anticipate what proportion of sales would be digital, and that there was a certain amount of pent-up demand, but it surpassed anything we anticipated.” He said post-launch the figure had “settled down” but continued to exceed predictions. “It is still running at a much higher rate than I was anticipating, even for the launch. It is still surpassing anything I’ve ever seen for e-book sales.”

Redmayne did not reveal the most popular selling single story, but rather the top selling feature was the “bundle” package, which includes the entire HP set at a discounted price. If you have not already purchased your Harry Potter e-books, you can do so here. We will continue to bring updates as we receive them regarding the e-books. I already purchased mine, have you? Happy Easter to all who celebrate, and if you don’t then Happy Sunday!

You’ve probably been following the progress, or rather lack of progress, with JK Rowling’s Pottermore website over the last several months. Well, after a very long silence, the Pottermore team have finally spoken out. (We think our tweets and emails may have helped!)

Some of you will be very pleased to hear that there is now an official date that Pottermore will open to the public – April 2012! That’s around 6 months later than planned, but we’re glad it’s finally happening and we’re happy that they’ve offered some explanation and hinted at visible changes being made to the site. Here’s what they said over on the Insider Blog:

We’re pleased to announce that pottermore.com will be open to everyone in early April 2012.

We know that the extended wait for those wishing to be part of Pottermore has been frustrating, and we’d like to thank you all for your patience so far.

Many of you are interested to know why we extended the original opening date beyond October of last year.

We always knew Pottermore would be incredibly popular, which is why we made the decision to only open to one million Beta users to begin with. We wanted to make sure that we had a really good understanding of how people want to use the site and which bits we’d need to modify before giving more people access.

We gathered some incredibly useful feedback from our Beta users, and it became clear that our original platform wouldn’t be suitable when millions more users came on to the site. So we made a big decision: to move Pottermore to an entirely different platform set up. This ‘invisible’ change has involved a lot of work behind the scenes but it will enable our users to get the best from Pottermore as it grows and develops.

There have definitely been some challenges and the whole Pottermore team has been working really hard to incorporate all the Beta activity and feedback. This means that over the coming weeks and months we’ll be adding exclusive content and many more exciting features (such as sounds) to Pottermore for you to explore, share and discover.

So get ready to join the Pottermore journey – the wait is nearly over.

That excitement seems like a distant memory now though, since Pottermore has been stuck in beta for over four months longer than promised. As well as delays there have been bugs, downtime, and a lack of content for those who do have beta access, because only the first book is currently available. Fans have become rather frustrated and a bit of a backlash has begun.

We can fully understand the technical challenges that must have faced the team behind the website, but the frustrating thing from our point of view has been the severe lack of information from Pottermore about what might be causing the behind-the-scenes problems and what they are doing to improve it. We have tried contacting them to get some information out of them, but to no avail.

Today, though, Scotsman.com has published an article about Pottermore and they quote a spokesperson for JK Rowling which provides the first real public acknowledgement of the problems, and hints that an announcement or something big may be on the way soon:

“We’re not ready to say yet [why there has been a delay]. There is no further information at the moment – but it will be obvious [why there has been a delay] when it is announced.”

Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne had this to say:

We are keen to support public and school libraries, and OverDrive, as one of the leading suppliers in this market, provides us with a global network that helps us achieve this, as well as encouraging the discovery of these amazing books across the world..

When released, readers will have immediate access to the eBooks on such devices as PCs, MACs, eReaders, Kindle (US Only), Nook, iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. Digital audiobooks will be available for borrowing in the MP3 file format on computers, smartphones, and iPods.

As more details and information, especially the release dates, become available we will inform you. Hearing this news has made me extremely happy, what about you? Are you super excited? Do you have an eReader or a smartphone to read the Harry Potter eBooks? If not, then be glad that you can go to a public library to read your favorite stories time and time again.