Perhaps it isn’t April Fools day after all! Pottermore Shop now open

I mentioned last week that Pottermore is set to open to the public on April 1st, unless it is a cruel April Fools day joke to potter fans.  It seems the Pottermore team is hoping to dispel the fears that it might be a joke by releasing part of the site (a part that wasn’t previously even available to beta users) today!  The Pottermore Shop, where we can finally purchase Harry Potter e-books, is now available in the US and Britain (with other regions and languages coming soon).

I do almost all of my reading these days on a Kindle or Kindle related app because I love the portability of it.  It has been extremely annoying for years that my favorite book series isn’t available on Kindle, because they are the books I’d most like to have with me at all times.

When I travel, I tend to need to bring several books with me because with all the extra reading time I tend to plow through a few books, and I just can’t carry the entire Harry Potter series in my carryon, so you can be sure I will be picking up the Complete Harry Potter Collection (for $57.54) very soon.

The Great:

• Buy once, get both .mobi (Kindle) and .epub versions!
• No DRM Crap to deal with, this will work on every .mobi and .epub reader
• Still supports Whispersync on Kindle even though you aren’t buying from Amazon!
• Also supports Google Play and Nook
• Audio books also have no DRM, plain .mp3 files!

The Good:

• Price for ebooks is good, if not great. (SS, CS and PA are $7.99 each, GF, OotP, HBP and DH $9.99 each, or the whole set $57.54)
• Audio books are cheaper than the CD versions previously available
• Store is easy to use and purchase

The NOT so Good:

• Audio books are still way too expensive (SS, CS and PA are $29.99 each, GF, OotP, HBP and DH $44.99 each, or the whole set for a whopping $242.94)
• I can’t buy the books on Amazon (or with my kindle directly) or on iTunes, kinda not very friendly to people who are used to buying that way.
• It won’t let me buy the British editions, even though I prefer them (Actually being familiar with Alchemy, I’ve always preferred to read “Philosopher’s Stone” to “Sorcerer’s Stone”)