“Shoppers buy the gift via shop.pottermore.com, and can add a personal message, as well as selecting the date on which the ebook or audiobook should arrive,” The Bookseller reported.

Separately, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is £3.99 in the U.K. and $5.99 in the U.S. “At least 40 percent of the sale price” of each ebook goes to J.K. Rowling’s children’s charity Lumos, as did the proceeds from the print edition.

As of July, the 50 Shades trilogy had sold 20 million copies in the United States, with sales roughly split between print and digital formats.

The Bookseller says that 50 Shades of Grey has sold 3.8 million copies in print according to Nielsen BookScan, which would suggest 1.5 million ebooks sold. (An earlier version of this article suggested that those were the actual sales figures, but Random House UK would not confirm them.) That actually means it’s sold fewer print copies than J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which sold 4 million copies in print. The Harry Potter ebooks were not available until this year, and Rowling is selling them separately through her own website, Pottermore.com — so we don’t yet have a comparable figure for how many  copies a single Harry Potter title has sold in both print and digital formats. (I’ve asked Pottermore if they can share any information.)

E.L. James published the 50 Shades trilogy with a small Australian publisher before the rights were snapped up by Random House on both sides of the Atlantic in April. The books started out as Twilight fan fiction posted in full on FF.net. The three ebooks had sold over 250,000 copies together and hit the top spots on the New York Times ebook fiction bestseller list before Random House bought the rights. Random House UK is not including those 250,000 copies in its overall sales figure. It’s unclear if Random House UK is including those earlier ebook sales in its figure, and I’ve asked for clarification.

Separately, Amazon announced this week that E.L. James is “the #1 bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk, eclipsing J.K. Rowling’s total sales.” Amazon said James has sold over two million ebooks at Amazon UK since April.

“If you buy a digital book you should be able to read it on anything you want to read it on.”

Learn more from the full Q&A embedded below:

The latest JK Rowling franchise has also raised eyebrows in the publishing world by selling e-books without digital rights protection.

“If you buy a digital book you should be able to read it on anything you want to read it on”, said Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne who was at paidContent 2012 in New York to chat about e-books with our publishing reporter, Laura Owen.

Redmayne said the decision to release the long awaited e-books without rights protection produced an initial spike in piracy as readers uploaded them to file-sharing sites. But the piracy soon abated as other readers pressed the moral case to take down the files (they also pointed out to the file-sharers that watermarks made them easily identifiable).

Redmayne also stated that Pottermore, which has been live for two months, has already received more than a billion pageviews. The website, which offers users a chance to participate in things like sorting hats and broomstick duels, is intended to supply the rest of the Harry Potter world in which the books are just a “narrow corridor.”

Pottermore has also pulled off another seemingly magical feat by persuading Amazon to redirect all sales to its site. Redmayne said this is in part a reflection of publishers’ desire to associate themselves with strong brands.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

As with Pottermore’s other retail agreements, the e-books aren’t sold directly through Kobo. Instead, Kobo’s website (which, for some reason, is currently illustrated with a picture of the Harry Potter books on the iPad) points users to the Pottermore store. Customers buy the e-books there and then link their Pottermore account to their Kobo account.

Pottermore has similar arrangements with Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Google. Pottermore hasn’t reached an agreement with Apple yet.

“Kobo is an increasingly powerful player in the e-reading market and we are delighted to have them on board,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in a statement.

(Speaking of Kobo becoming increasingly powerful: Kobo’s parent company, Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten, also announced a $100 million investment in popular image-sharing site Pinterest to help power retail with social).

The news comes a week after Amazon announced that it will make all of the Harry Potter e-books available free to Kindle-owning Amazon Prime members in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

The e-books will be available in all languages, though the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is U.S.-only.

“It’s a commercial deal that makes sense even with a level of cannibalization of my sales,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne tells paidContent, “but I believe it will actually drive greater sales.”

“The way the deal is structured means that any lost sales are more than made up for,” Redmayne says. “Yes, some people will borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and therefore not buy, but Amazon is paying us a large amount of money for that right, and I believe it’s a commercial deal that makes sense.”

Moreover, Redmayne says the deal “enables people to discover Harry Potter” and thinks that most of the time, readers who “kind of wanted to [buy Harry Potter books] but haven’t…will go to KOLL, discover the brilliance of Jo Rowling’s writing and want to buy the rest and own the set.” Redmayne pointed to some statistics Amazon previously released: The company said that in the case of the Hunger Games trilogy, which is available through KOLL, nineteen percent of customers who borrowed the first book in the trilogy went on to purchase one of the later books instead of waiting another thirty days to borrow it.

Jeff Bezos says regular libraries’ wait times are way too long

Harry Potter e-books are among the most-requested titles through digital library distributor OverDrive, and public library wait times can be long. With Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, “you never get put on a waiting list,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in the release.

Redmayne was more supportive of libraries, telling me, “The deal we did with public libraries through OverDrive is very much about aiding discovery. Libraries have proven a very effective way of aiding that discovery and introducing people to brands.”

Pottermore also promises more platforms, but not Apple yet

Separately, Redmayne tells the Guardian that Pottermore will announce “new partners and new platforms for the site” in the “next few weeks,” but Apple isn’t one of them yet. (Apple uses the agency model for everything sold on iTunes; it hasn’t yet agreed to send users directly to Pottermore as other retailers have.) “We’re having conversations with Apple, but there is no date, no agreement. Would I like to be working with Apple? Absolutely.”

I’ll be interviewing Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne at paidContent 2012, May 23 at the TimesCenter in New York City. Register here.

When I asked Amazon about this, a spokeswoman told me, “We’ll have to ask you to stay tuned for an upcoming announcement.” The company declined to comment on timing.

The banner, on the Kindle home page, is in the Harry Potter font and isn’t clickable.

Since the banner is on the Kindle page, this may have something to do with Pottermore. Through its arrangement with Pottermore, Amazon doesn’t sell the Harry Potter Kindle books directly. Instead, it sends shoppers to Pottermore’s site to buy the e-books, then connects to users’ Amazon accounts to get the e-books on Kindle. It’s possible the “wizardry” announcement is that Kindle is going to begin selling the e-books directly, but that would go against the company’s contract with Pottermore and would have to be done with Pottermore’s permission.

Selling the e-books directly through Pottermore, J. K. Rowling said back when the site was first announced, “means we can guarantee people everywhere are getting the same experience and at the same time.”

Because the e-books aren’t sold directly through Amazon, they don’t appear on the Kindle bestseller lists. Pottermore sold nearly $5 million worth of e-books in its first month, but it’s possible Amazon managed to argue the books would be doing even better if they were sold directly through Kindle.

Could Amazon do a Harry Potter Kindle?

Of course, it could be something else entirely. One reader wonders if it’s a Harry Potter-branded Kindle. But Kindle competitor (uh…sort of) Sony is a Pottermore partner, providing technology for the site and offering Sony Reader/Harry Potter e-book bundles.

Another reader points out it looks as if that owl is posing with a diploma.

I’ll be interviewing Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne at paidContent 2012, May 23 at the TimesCenter in New York City. Register here.

Pottermore launched its e-bookstore, the exclusive place to buy Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks, on March 27 and opened the rest of the interactive Harry Potter universe to the public on April 14. Since then, Redmayne says, Pottermore has added 5 million new users, for a total of 7 million unique users in the first two weeks. The average user visits 47 pages and spends 25 minutes on the site.

That’s about 525,000 books

The Harry Potter e-books are priced at $7.99 each (for the first three) or $9.99 each (for the final four books in the series). (Discounted bundles of all seven books are also available.) Assuming an average price of $9.13, that means around 525,739 copies were sold in the first month. Around 164,000 copies were sold in the first three days alone, and Redmayne acknowledged sales had “settled down” but “remain very significant.”

Print sales up, too

The Harry Potter e-books are DRM-free. ”Obviously there were fears piracy would increase as a result of being DRM-free, and that sales of the e-books would cannibalize sales of the physical titles,” Redmayne told The Bookseller, “but we were delighted to see sales of the physical books go up, and piracy come down.” He also said that “though there had been an increase in piracy immediately after launch, the community had rejected these illegal versions because of how the e-books were brought to market.”

I’ll be interviewing Charlie Redmayne at paidContent 2012, May 23 at the TimesCenter in New York. Register here.

All of the books keep their original covers and it is fun to see the European art. Remember when Harry Potter played chess with the giant mouse-bear?

Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne will be speaking at paidContent 2012, May 23 at the TimesCenter in New York City. Register here.

Redmayne said Pottermore sold over £1 million worth of e-books, about $1.59 million at £0.63 pounds to the dollar.

The Harry Potter e-books are priced at $7.99 each (for the first three) or $9.99 each (for the final four books in the series). Assuming an average price of $9.13, that means around 164,000 copies were sold in the first three days.

Earlier today, I wrote a post asking how well the Harry Potter e-books are selling – then went on to say that it’s tough to gauge because they won’t appear on Kindle or Nook bestseller lists. But now there’s an actual figure for ya.

“The Naked Book” is run by The Bookseller‘s Philip Jones and airs online every other Wednesday at 3 PM ET (8 PM UK). It’s also available as a free podcast.