Pottermore at Playstation Home will be available in April. According to an announcement on Pottermore’s blog, “you’ll be able to actually step inside Diagon Alley™ and board the Hogwarts™ Express as an Avatar, and once inside these 3D environments, experience the mayhem of book herding, test your knowledge with a Pottermore quiz, share and collect Trading Cards, and take part in an illicit Wizard’s Duel.”

“Pottermore reaches across multiple digital platforms, and our ongoing partnership with Sony has allowed us to forge this exciting connection with Playstation Home,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in a statement, “creating the most immersive experience possible within that space and giving users wonderful new ways to explore locations from the Harry Potter stories.”

Sony is a Pottermore partner, and last November the companies launched a Harry Potter-themed PS3 game, “Wonderbook: Book of Spells.”

Pottermore launched as a digital bookstore in March 2012 and opened up its interactive features the following month. The most recent available user stats are from October 12, when Redmayne said at the Publishers Launch Conference in Frankfurt that the site had 36 million unique users.

Apple and the horrible, no good, very bad Maps app

The Amazing iOS 6 Maps Tumblr

The September launch of the iPhone 5 was marred by the disastrous reception Apple’s new Maps app received. Parody social media accounts popped up within hours, as disappointed users complained of poor or missing location data. CEO Tim Cook felt compelled to make a public apology, and it’s thought that the episode was the last straw that caused Cook to send SVP Scott Forstall packing. To rub extra salt in the wound, Google’s own Maps app for iPhone was greeted with the Twitter equivalent of a Hallelujah chorus when it arrived last week – and was downloaded 10 million times in 48 hours. – Erica Ogg

Google’s media player that never got a chance to play

Google surprised many in June when it announced the Nexus Q, a wireless digital content player dubbed as “the first social streaming media player.” But not all surprises are good ones. The small orb-shaped device launched at an introductory price of $299, triple that of the more capable Apple TV. And aside from the high price point, the Q offered no media services save Google’s own Play store for movies, television shows and music. The unique DJ function — allowing anyone’s Android device on the same network to mix the music — was hardly enough to justify the Q, which Google suspended indefinitely in July. — Kevin C. Tofel

Facebook’s troubled IPO

The initial public offering of the world’s largest social network was supposed to be the tide that lifted all technology boats, but the IPO instead turned into a stock-market train wreck and crushed the hopes of many other tech-stock hopefuls in the process. Thanks to a combination of mismanagement by the NASDAQ stock exchange (which used a new trading system for the issue) and a misreading of the initial demand by Facebook and its brokers — which resulted in an over-supply of stock — the company’s share price tumbled by more than 50 percent in the days and weeks following the offering. The company still wound up raising more than $16 billion, but the episode gave the tech darling a black eye as far as some investors were concerned, and likely set the market for tech-stock issues back by months, if not longer. — Mathew Ingram 

Two words: HP and Autonomy

The $11.1 billion purchase of Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard may have been announced in 2011, but the enormity of the screw-up didn’t fully surface till 2012. In May, HP management booted former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, and in November the company asked authorities in the U.S. and U.K. to look into Autonomy’s accounting practices prior to the buyout. That process is ostensibly now underway. Nevertheless, after airing all this dirty laundry in the November earnings call, HP CEO Meg Whitman asserted that HP remains “100 percent committed to Autonomy.” For the record, HP took a loss of $6.85 billion for the full fiscal year ended October 31, 2012 — most of that from an $8 billion writedown related to the Autonomy business. — Barb Darrow 

Nate Silver’s an idiot and Romney wins in a landslide

Except…Nate Silver isn’t and Mitt Romney didn’t. Silver, the founder of the New York Times‘ popular FiveThirtyEight politics blog, and several other notable statisticians mathematically predicted Barack Obama’s reelection with perfect or near-perfect accuracy. Meanwhile, Karl Rove sputtered through election night on Fox News, futilely defending his prediction like a child trying to convince a teacher a dog ate his homework. Maybe there’s something to this data analysis after all. Go figure. – Derrick Harris 

Amanda Palmer crowdfunding fubar

Alt-rock fave Amanda Palmer experienced the downside of social network savviness in September after she raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to fund her new CD — then solicited musicians to play for free on her subsequent concert tour. Reaction was heated and Palmer quickly regrouped, saying she would pay more than beer, hugs and “merch” for the help. The alternate theory is that this was all a massive publicity stunt — in which case, it was hugely successful. (Palmer has since cancelled her 2013 tour to help a friend deal with cancer.) — Barb Darrow 

Twitter gags NBC Olympics critic

What do you when someone says mean things about your friends? You shut them up; at least, that’s what Twitter did during the London Olympics when it suspended the account of journalist Guy Adams, who tweeted snarky things about the TV coverage of Twitter’s corporate partner NBC. Twitter blamed an internal communications snafu and restored the journalist’s account two days later. Still, the incident became Twitter’s first full-blown PR crisis and a reminder of its growing shadow over our media lives. — Jeff Roberts 

The Western Mail’s caption fail

Tweeters celebrate epic #fails on an almost minute-by-minute basis. And for digital media aficionados, ye olde newspaper sub-editing and caption errors rank high on that dreary list. But there was none more epic in 2012 than Welsh newspaper the Western Mail, which committed what was labeled “the worst caption fail of all time” when it identified a photo of an airport manager, who died when the plane he was travelling in hit a mountain, with “LOL.” Although British prime minister David Cameron may think the acronym stands for “lots of love”, everyone else knows not to “laugh out loud.” The internet was not amused. Nor was Western Mail publisher Trinity Mirror, which responded, “We apologize for any offense this error may have caused.” – Robert Andrews

AT&T’s face-off over FaceTime

Trying to convince your customers, the public and your regulators that you’re just a big, cuddly carrier without an anticompetitive bone in your body? Maybe blocking a wildly popular app that happens to compete directly with your core service isn’t the best way to score points. Oh, but wait, AT&T didn’t block FaceTime over its cellular networks. You could use Apple’s video chat app to your heart’s content if you signed up for one AT&T’s (more expensive) family share plans. It’s not every day that a carrier stifles competition and jilts its customers for more money in a single brush stroke, but Ma Bell is a very efficient painter. Eventually consumer protests and the threat of the FCC involvement caused AT&T to backtrack. It offered FaceTime over cellular to more subscribers, and sheepishly claimed it was just protecting its customers from the inevitable network overload FaceTime would bring. Okay, but if AT&T’s new fangled 4G networks can’t handle video, what was the point in building them? Email and Twitter updates? — Kevin Fitchard

Bravo’s Silicon Valley startup trainwreck

Silicon Valley has been abuzz with Randi Zuckerberg’s Bravo reality show “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” which attempted to portray the craaaazy lives of startup founders and their companies in the Wild West. However, the show has been widely panned by techies and journalists in the Valley, who are obviously underwhelmed by shots of people in the pool with iPads and dialogue like ”Silicon Valley is just…balls to the wall.” Of course there’s an element of hilarity to the shenanigans associated with tech startups in the Valley, but it doesn’t appear that Zuckerberg’s show will be the one to effectively dramatize it. And now that the final episodes are being downgraded to a 4 PM PST time slot, looks like the show’s on its way out. – Eliza Kern

J.K. Rowling’s unreadable book

Getty Images

J. K. Rowling fans who’d preordered the ebook edition of her hotly anticipated new novel, The Casual Vacancy, were in for a surprise on September 27: Thanks to improper formatting by publisher Hachette, the ebook was literally unreadable, with a choice of two type sizes — microscopic or massive. Hachette pushed out a new file later in the day, but this was one of the biggest books of the year, and in 2012 there’s no excuse for failing to test an ebook before you release it. – Laura Owen 

VeriFone copies Square’s user agreement

VeriFone launched its mobile payment acceptance system Sail to compete with Square. But it went a little too far in emulating Square when it copied big chunks of wording from Square’s user agreement. When called on it by GigaOM, VeriFone cut about a third of its user agreement out to eliminate the copied text. – Ryan Kim

So who didn’t suffer a data breach?

Shutterstock/deepspacedave

So much for consumer confidence. In 2012, several of the biggest names in tech were forced to ask for users’ forgiveness after hackers gained access to customer records. In January, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh apologized after hackers accessed names, email, billing and shipping address and scrambled passwords for potentially 24 million customers. And, in June, Yahoo, LinkedIn , Last.fm and eHarmony followed up with confessions of their own after a spate of hack attacks that compromised user passwords. In April, electronic transaction processing provider Global Payments also confirmed a data breach of 1.5 million credit cards. – Ki Mae Heussner

“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.

Update, 9/27, 5:15 PM ET: Hachette released the following statement:

Yesterday the eBook file for The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling was released to all U.S. eBook retailers. There were issues with that file, including the adjustability of font color and size and adjustability of margins. As soon as Hachette was made aware of these issues a replacement file was uploaded to all eBook retailers. Hachette has requested that each retailer contact their customers directly about reloading their eBook. Any consumer who purchased the eBook on Thursday, September 27, before approximately 3:00pm ET, who has not heard from their retailer, should contact them and request that their eBook be reloaded. No consumer should have to repurchase the eBook.

Amazon says “We have worked with the publisher to correct this issue, including for customers who have already purchased the book.  The updated file is already available for new purchases and we will make it possible for past purchases to get the updated file in the next few hours.”

Update, 9/27, 2:30 PM ET: Hachette confirmed that the problem was on its end, not Amazon’s, and that the problem was across all ebook retailers. “There was an issue with the file (no issues reading the book, just adjusting the type), but that has been corrected and is fully adjustable/functional for all those who have purchased the e-book and for those who will purchase it in the future,” Hachette executive director of publicity Nicole Dewey told me. But that’s not true: If you’ve already bought the ebook, the file isn’t going to correct itself. You’ll have to download it again — and Amazon isn’t yet pushing out an updated version, so you can either try buying the ebook again (which: why?) or wait for an update to roll out.

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling’s new book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, was published today to great fanfare and decidedly mixed reviews. Some ebook readers are holding on off on purchasing the digital edition because it’s priced at $17.99 (here’s why), but e-reader owners who did buy it right away are in for a disappointment: It’s basically unreadable, unless you have a magnifying glass.

Twitter user Alan Jacobs was among the first to notice the problem (thanks for the tip, Robin Sloan):

Someone throughly screwed up the font in the Kindle ed. of The Casual Vanancy: you can choose only minuscule or enormous.

— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) September 27, 2012

I confirmed the problem on two separate Kindle e-readers (the book looks fine on the Kindle app on iPad) and it’s happening on other e-readers, like the Barnes  & Noble Nook, as well. Amazon customers are complaining (leading to a slew of comments about whether it’s fair to comment on the book’s formatting rather than its content, but I think it’s justified in this case since the problem isn’t apparent before you buy the ebook). Adjusting the book’s type size on the Kindle only adjusts the margins. Here are your choices:

This is clearly just a file formatting problem. It’s unclear if the problem is with the file Hachette supplied Amazon or if the problem is on Amazon’s end (I’ve asked both companies for comment). Hachette confirmed that the problem is Hachette’s not Amazon’s. It won’t take long to fix. It will probably be fixed by tomorrow, if not earlier.

But. This book is the big book of the season. Why didn’t either Amazon or Hachette test the ebook before putting it on sale? (Maybe because of all the embargoes on it?) It’s $17.99. At the very least, it should be readable. The Rowling fans who were so excited about The Casual Vacancy ebook that they pre-ordered it or bought it this morning should be able to start reading it right away, and they shouldn’t have to have super-human vision to do so.

That won’t be the case for long. Soon enough, retailers will be able to sell the ebook edition of The Casual Vacancy for $9.99 or whatever price they want. But tomorrow, when the ebook goes on sale, and for several weeks after that, customers will be paying more for it than they would have before the ebook pricing settlement was approved.

Here’s why. The suggested retail price of The Casual Vacancy hardcover is $35. Publishers use wholesale pricing for print books: They set the books’ list price; retailers buy the books at a discount and can then resell them at whatever price they want. That’s why The Casual Vacancy hardcover is $20.90 on Amazon.

For ebooks, things are different. Recall that Hachette is settling with the Department of Justice over allegedly colluding to fix ebook prices. Upon the settlement’s approval, Hachette (and the other two settling publishers, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster) had seven days to terminate their contracts with Apple. Now Apple’s price bands — which would have stipulated that The Casual Vacancy ebook be priced at a maximum of $16.99, assuming a hardcover price of $35 — are no longer in effect.

The settling publishers have longer to terminate agreements with other retailers, like Amazon: “Starting 30 days after the Court enters the proposed Final Judgment,” they may terminate those contracts ”as soon as each contract permits” (i.e., when it expires), or the retailers can terminate the contracts on 30 days’ notice. That adds up to about sixty days of wiggle room. (Thanks to Dear Author blogger and attorney Jane Litte who helped me with some of the math on this.)

The settling publishers can enact new retailer contracts much faster, as HarperCollins did, but they don’t have to if they don’t want to. Hachette CEO David Young told the WSJ on Wednesday that the company hasn’t yet agreed on new contract with retailers.

In the meantime, Hachette’s in a sweet spot where it’s no longer limited by Apple’s price bands, but non-Apple retailers like Amazon also aren’t allowed to discount its books. So if you want The Casual Vacancy tomorrow you’ll be paying $17.99. (A possible caveat: If Apple is now operating under a new contract with Hachette, it seems it could discount The Casual Vacancy if it wants to. At that point, Amazon and other retailers might be able to invoke the most-favored-nation clauses in their own contracts and drop the ebook’s price as well. We’ll see if this happens.)

Note: I’m aware this post is likely to engender a lot of “greedy publishers” comments. The fact is that the ebook pricing settlement incentivizes publishers to set higher ebook list prices. Depending on the new contracts that Hachette works out with retailers, there may be little difference between the money that Hachette gets from Casual Vacancy sales now and the money it gets once those new contracts are enacted.

Amazon announced it was selling more ebooks than print books in the U.S. in May 2011 — 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. “We hit this milestone in the US less than four years after introducing Kindle,” Jorrit Van der Meulen, VP of Kindle EU says in the release, “so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable and shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle.”

Free Kindle books are excluded, but “if included would make the number even higher.” The Kindle UK store includes nearly 1.4 million ebooks.

A couple other facts from the release, which heavily promotes Amazon’s ebook self-publishing service KDP:

• Amazon says that UK Kindle readers buy four times more books than they did before owning a Kindle.
• E.L. James, author of the “50 Shades of Grey” trilogy, is “the #1 bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk, eclipsing JK Rowling’s total sales.” She sold over two million Kindle books at Amazon UK in four months.

In May, UK bookstore chain Waterstones partnered with Amazon to sell Kindle e-readers in its nearly 300 stores.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Amazon UK’s ebook-print book ratio. I apologize for the error.

Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter community site and the exclusive source for the Harry Potter digital audiobooks and e-books, was announced last year. While the interactive community portion of the site is still in beta and set to open to a general audience in April, the bookstore is open now. (It was originally supposed to open in October 2011.)

What do the books cost? The first three books in the Harry Potter series are $7.99 (£4.99) as e-books and $29.99 (£17.99) as digital audiobooks. The final four books in the series are $9.99 (£6.99) as e-books and $44.99 (£32.99) as digital audiobooks. Readers can also buy a complete e-book bundle for $57.54 or a complete digital audiobook bundle for $242.94

Which e-readers are compatible with the e-books? It looks as though Pottermore has done a great job making the e-books available across every possible device. And the site has worked out an unusual arrangement with major e-bookstores:

We have partnered with the following services to make it easy to send your Harry Potter eBook to your account. (Subject to reading service availability in your country.)

Sony (NYSE: SNE) Reader online account (US and Canadian based customers only) [Sony is at the top because Sony is a Pottermore partner]
Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle (available in most countries)
Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) NOOK (US and Canadian based customers only)
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Play (This service is currently available in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States)

The accounts are linked during the download process. In order to set up a linked account, please go to ‘My books’, select one of your Harry Potter eBooks to download and choose your reading service. You can view these linked accounts by going to ‘My shop account’ then ‘Linked accounts’. Please note you can link to one account per reading service.

Check out the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone entry on Amazon this morning and you’ll see this (click to enlarge):

What, you haven’t seen Amazon do that before? No, you sure haven’t.

Amazon also has an FAQ for how to get the Harry Potter e-books onto your Kindle.

Is the process too complicated, with several clicks before you actually have the book on your e-reader? Maybe. We’ll surely see more reactions to it this morning as people start buying the e-books. Note Pottermore is directing users to the individual retailers’ customer support so it may be Amazon (and Barnes & Noble and so on) flooded with customer service requests rather than Pottermore.

UK book trade publication The Bookseller confirms that e-book retailers will eventually receive affiliate fees. Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said “clearly [retailers] should earn out of it in the same way we should.”

What about Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and iOS? Directions on how to load the book onto iPhones and iPads are here. But The Bookseller reports that Pottermore wasn’t able to come to an iBookstore agreement with Apple by the time the Pottermore shop launched.

Is there DRM? No, the e-books do not have DRM. Instead, they’re watermarked (or, as Pottermore kindly describes it, “personalized”): “The Pottermore Shop personalises eBooks with a combination of watermarking techniques that relate to the book, to the purchaser and the purchase time. This allows us to track and respond to possible copyright misuse.” Go, Pottermore. Watermarking is often floated as a good possible alternative to DRM — one that allows users easy access to the books they bought without wanting to share them — but it hasn’t been used much in trade books before now.

The site notes users can download the e-books they buy for personal use up to eight times:

eBooks purchased from the Pottermore Shop can be downloaded for your personal use up to eight times, at no additional cost. If you want to share your Harry Potter eBook with your own children, that’s absolutely fine with us too, so long as they are under 18. Actually, we’d encourage it! However, once they are over 18, they will need to buy their own copy.

You might want to download a copy to your laptop, your tablet, and your child’s eReader – whatever the combination – you have eight available downloads per book. There’s no time limit to use up your downloads, so if you lose your device or close an account with one of our partners, come back at any time to take another copy.

Eight downloads will normally be plenty, so you won’t need to buy again. However, if you do download a book more than eight times, or want to buy it as a gift, you will need to purchase it again. For more details on downloads and how they can be used, please see our Terms & Conditions.

Are the e-books available internationally? Which languages are available? The e-books and digital audiobooks are only available in U.S. and UK English for now, but “French, German, Spanish and Italian language eBooks will be available soon, and many further languages will follow. Digital audio books in German and Italian will also be available shortly.” The e-books and digital audiobooks are available for sale internationally.

Are the e-books available in libraries now? The e-books and digital audiobooks will be available to libraries through OverDrive, but this morning I’m not seeing them available in the NYPL yet. The Bookseller reports, “Libraries will be able to loan each e-book edition as many times as there is demand, but the license will only last for five years, after which libraries will need to purchase a new edition.”

On the Pottermore Insider blog, the company explains beta users’ feedback made it “clear that our original platform wouldn’t be suitable when millions more users came on to the site.” So they chose 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.”

Now, at the beginning of April, Pottermore will sell the Harry Potter series as e-books and digital audiobooks for the first time.

Pottermore, including its e-bookstore, was originally supposed to launch back in October. At that time, though, the company wasn’t able to open general registration on the site or launch the store, citing “overwhelming traffic concerns.” Throughout the beta period, the site has often been slow or impossible to access.

OverDrive, the largest distributor of digital materials to libraries, is also providing the sales platform for paid e-book sales on Pottermore.com.

The news comes at a time when most big publishers have restricted library access to their e-books. “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,” said Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne in a statement.

Penguin recently ended its relationship with the company and will no longer distribute e-books and digital audiobooks to libraries — at least until it finds a new partner. Three “big-six” publishers — Macmillan, Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) and Hachette — do not make e-books available to libraries. HarperCollins allows e-books to be checked out 26 times before the library has to buy a new copy, and Random House continues to offer unrestricted access to its e-books through libraries, though it will raise its prices starting March 1. (For a handy list of how a variety of publishers, large and small, handle e-books in libraries, see this Digital Shift post.)

Publishers who do not participate in e-book library lending are concerned that digital library checkouts may cut into paid book sales (and worry about other things too), but Rowling and Pottermore clearly feel that the benefits of making the e-books available in school and public libraries outweigh any disadvantages.

The announcement does not contain any more details about when the delayed Pottermore will officially launch.

Hachette’s Little, Brown in both the U.S. and UK and Hachette companies worldwide will publish Rowling’s yet-to-be-named-or-further-described book as both a print book and an e-book.

The Bookseller notes it’s “been rumored for sometime that Rowling was working on a crime novel set in Edinburgh,” but Hachette and Rowling haven’t released any more details on what the book will be about or when it will be published. No financial data about the deal, such as the size of Rowling’s advance if Little, Brown gave her one, is available.

Update: Rowling tweeted her book will be out later this year:

As you may have heard, I have a new book out later this year.Very different to Harry, although I’ve enjoyed writing it every bit as much.

— J K Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 24, 2012

The Blair Partnership, Rowling’s longtime literary agency, represented her in the deal.

The publisher for the Harry Potter print books is Bloomsbury in the UK and Scholastic in the U.S. Rowling retained the e-book rights for the Potter series and is selling the e-books and digital audiobooks herself at Pottermore.com. Pottermore was supposed to launch and start selling e-books last year, but it’s delayed and still in beta.