Julian, perhaps I missed this, but are they going to stop printing Harry Potter books? If not, what does your comment mean?

Surely it is the publisher and not the booksellers who has effectively paid for all the publicity and helped to make the books widely known and to become popular. The booksellers have simply taken the largest share of the revenue. It is also the publisher who has paid for editing and other preparation costs. So, in whatever format the books are sold, the way this is done should be an agreement between the author and the publisher.

It is a sound business decision for the author and/or publisher of such a popular series to sell books directly rather than via retailers but it is insulting to readers' and booksellers' intelligence to use 'ease of availability' as a euphemism for 'we keep all the profits'.

I think it's a great shame that the bookshops which loyally supported the print versions, especially the small independents who could not compete with the supermarkets' special offers but still stocked the books, have been left out of the Harry Potter eBook market. Fair enough to want to set a price and stick to it but it's never a good idea to cut out those who supported you on the way up, especially as many shops opened at midnight and held special Harry Potter events so added to the enjoyment of the books.

It is still to be seen if there will be any regional sales restrictions, but I would imagine not. That is what I would call "ease of availability". If you haven't tried to a buy a book from an online retailer just to find that that retailer can't sell that particular book to you because of where you live, then you're not really into ebooks.

Where is the BookScan wizzard? How many copies of Harry Potter books were sold last week?

I would like to know how much profit the book stores have already made from the Harry Potter books.

I truly feel for the plight of the B&M book stores but they need to re focus their business approach rather than lash out at everything they feel is an affront to their business.

I love the Potter books and am grateful they were printed in the first place.

Martin, traditional B&M bookstores made very little profit out of HP. Each book was an exercise in customer retention because Bloomsbury would sell copies to anyone who wanted them, and supermarkets used the book as a promotional tool to get customers to visit their stores and purchase other profitable stuff. They could afford to loss-lead. Booksellers couldn't, so we made hardly anything from the books.
In many ways, HP did more damage to the traditional B&M bookshops in the UK than good, simply because of the numbers being sold, and supermarkets wanted in. The shame was the publisher (how many other titles published by Bloomsbury do supermarkets sell?? - this was the argument used) allowed their product to be devalued by these sellers. And damaged the book trade as a result. And sell no more to supermarkets than pre-HP.

But surely this is also the fault of the B&M bookstore for not realising the problem and addressing it via greater discounts or co-op agreements.
I doubt that Bloomsbury would alienate a large portion of their front facing book sales but not addressing the issue of their RRP being lower than expected to maintain a reasonable profit margin on that title. I guess this goes for every title that falls into this catagory, I can think of a half dozen cooking books which fall into this catagory.

I understand a lot of the problems facing B&M bookstores and it depresses me because I enjoy a good book shop as much as the next person.