• Absence of Harry Potter release sees profits fall 35% last year
• Company plans talks with Apple about iPad
Richard Wray, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 March 2010
Left - Bloomsbury hopes a new generation of readers will fall under the Harry Potter spell. Photograph: Frank May/EPA
Harry Potter is getting a makeover. The boy wizard's seven adventures, penned by JK Rowling, are being given new covers by publisher Bloomsbury this summer as it looks to recapture just a little of its magic.
The absence of a new Potter book left the publisher out of pocket last year, with profits down 35%, but announcing the company's annual results, the chief executive, Nigel Newton, said trading had been "excellent".
He added that the company was hoping to find space for digital editions of its books on Apple's iPad, due to go on sale in the US on Saturday and in the UK a few weeks later.
"It has not come to the UK yet, so that is a piece of business yet to happen, but I can certainly say that the iPad looks like a very exciting platform indeed," he said. "Obviously it is the most important development in ebooks in recent months, so we will certainly be talking to Apple."
Media companies have become increasingly excited about the potential of the iPad to enable them to increase their digital revenues. At launch, several newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times and Newsweek, will have iPad applications which users can download for a fee. Apple is also setting up the iBookstore for digital titles and has already signed up publishers Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Hachette. But last week Random House admitted it might not put its authors on the device because it fears the iPad could result in a sharp drop in the money it makes from ebooks.
Newton said Bloomsbury's ebook sales are soaring, although from a very low base, thanks in part to the release of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader, which came to the UK in October. Its bestselling etitle to date is My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands, by US comedian Chelsea Handler.
The full report at The Guardian.
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