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.

Amazon U.K. matched all of Sony’s prices, leading to a deeply discounted market for many ebooks and causing concern for publishers about the devaluation of their product (even though the retailers were paying them the full prices on the discounted ebooks).

The end of the 20p promotion is tied to Sony’s redesign of its U.K. digital bookstore. “Discounted 20p pricing is not currently offered on the newly relaunched UK Reader Store,” a Sony rep told The Bookseller. “However, pricing is always subject to revision. The duration of our 20p pricing is indicative of our commitment to provide great eBooks at exceptionally accessible prices, which is a philosophy we continue to hold.”

Many of the books included in the promotion shot up U.K. bestseller lists, but some publishers and others were concerned that the promotions would devalue ebooks by permanently lowering the prices that consumers were willing to pay. Those concerns may be lessened now, though Sony could always start its 20p promotion again — or Amazon could start one.

On Wednesday in New York, Sony announced the PlayStation 4, which comes with souped-up hardware that the company says will virtually eliminate the time video game players must wait for their games to load. The company also touted a new “share” button on its controller that will let players capture video clips, not just screenshots, of their game play to send to friends.

During a presentation heavy with video game demos, Sony also touted its Vita portable device as the vanguard of mobile play. An executive explained how a player, bumped by others from the living room big screen, can immediately continue his game on the handheld Vita — a tablet experience of sorts.

Reaction by video game fans on Twitter and live blogs at Wired and the Verge was underwhelming. This included disappointment that the new PlayStation 4 would not include backwards compatibility via streaming with earlier PlayStation games.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sony spent little time addressing the role of consoles like the PlayStation as an onramp to the larger world of media. In this context, the PlayStation is just one of a growing number of devices — including Roku, Boxee, Apple TV(i aapl) and (soon) Intel — that link consumers to movies, music and more.

A Sony executive did note that the PlayStation was the most popular device for accessing NetFlix. But the company didn’t devote time to expounding a larger media vision such as that of Microsoft’s entertainment and digital media president who, at a recent media event, announced the company is producing its own interactive TV shows.

Sony did not announce a price or even display the console itself during the two-hour long event, but did announce in closing that the device will be available around “holiday 2013,” presumably in time for the November/December shopping season.

Long-form TV dramas were a tough sell in the past, Lynton argued, because story lines had to accommodate audiences that wouldn’t tune in every week. With Netflix and other methods of catch-up, TV has gotten a lot better, he said: “One of the reasons that you are seeing this explosion in creativity going on right now…. is the fact that you can now create these 13 episode long-form narratives.”

Common wisdom in the industry has been that long-form dramas like Mad Men and Homeland are attributable to the rise of cable networks like AMC, HBO, and Showtime, but Lynton disputed that notion. “This is something completely different,” he said, and completely attributable to technology. Lynton went on to say that it’s still not clear how technology will have an impact on the creative process in the area of movies.

The Nexus 7, on sale in Japan via the Google Play website today, will sell for 19,800 yen (about $254) in Japan. Buyers also get a 2,000-yen credit to the Google Play store. Reuters reports:

Japan has rapidly embraced the smartphone, with devices running Google’s Android operating system tripling in the past year, according to Google. Google said that Japan now ranks third in terms of downloaded applications from its Play store.

Reuters also says that in addition to rental movies, Google will sell movies from Sony and Paramount to customers in Japan.

In addition to Japan, Google ebooks are now available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, France and, as of earlier this month, South Korea. Kobo, owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, launched in Japan in July. Amazon is expected to launch the Kindle e-reader in Japan in October.

At GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Jack Buser, Sony’s senior director of PlayStation digital platforms, talked about why Sony developed the PlayStation Mobile platform for PlayStation games that can, for the first time, be played on devices not made by the Japanese company. The short answer to that is basically that they had to: Sony had to reach gamers on the devices they are already using.

“We embraced PlayStation Mobile because we know there are situations where gamers may only have their mobile device and we want to supply a PlayStation experience no matter what,” Buser said.

That list of devices includes smartphones and tablets made by HTC, Fujitsu and Sharp, among others. The theme? They’re all Android-based devices.

The benefit to participants is free marketing. For Android game makers that want to build for the PlayStation Mobile platform — which will play games on the PlayStation Vita as well as PlayStation-certified mobile devices — Sony will use all the marketing heft it has behind its multiple gaming channels to advertise and promote those games.

Recognizing the role of mobile, and that people are used to paying 99 cents and not $49.99 for games, Sony is rolling out a mobile subscription gaming plan too. PlayStation Plus is a subscription service for the PS3 and PS Vita. Five dollars per month delivers a new set of games to the user. They’ll be big titles, too, he promised. Not many casual games.

Sony is promoting “console games for console gamers,” Buser said, likely referencing mobile gaming leader Zynga, not “farm simulators.”

Update: This post was corrected at 9:49 a.m. on 9/21 to note that PS Plus is for PS 3 and PS Vita customers. It has not yet been announced whether the service will be available to other PS Mobile devices.

(Note: The chart is cutting off part of the last column, Sony. You can see my full pricing spreadsheet here.)

A couple notes:

• Amazon doesn’t show the ebooks’ list prices. I had to go to Barnes & Noble for those. I obviously haven’t looked at HarperCollins’ entire list, but you can see that in some cases it’s raised ebooks’ list prices. For example, Michael Chabon’s upcoming Telegraph Avenue, which would have been priced at $12.99 or $14.99 under agency, has a list price of $17.99 in the new world.
• Apple is now discounting titles too (that wasn’t true yesterday). In some cases, as you’ll see above, Apple is offering lower prices on new bestsellers than Amazon. Amazon dropped prices to match Apple’s this afternoon. More on that here.
• Amazon is offering the lowest prices. Based just on the titles above, the average price on Amazon Kindle was $8.43; on Apple, $9.81; on Barnes & Noble Nook, $9.57; on Google Play, $9.91; on Sony (SNE), $10.42; on Kobo, $12.25.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge

The states accuse Apple of colluding with publishers to set ebook prices. Apple and the other two publishers in the case — Macmillan and Penguin — are not settling, but the states’ settlement would provide payouts to consumers who bought ebooks from Macmillan and Penguin as well.

“This action sends a strong message that this sort of anticompetitive behavior will not be accepted,” said Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, who led the states’ investigation into ebook pricing along with the state of Texas. “Through our ongoing litigation, we hope to provide additional restitution to consumers. Additionally, I’m especially proud of the exemplary bipartisan cooperation on both the state and federal level on this matter, which involved 54 states and jurisdictions working together on behalf of consumers across the country.”

The states’ proposed settlement with publishers is not yet available online, but reports from various state newspapers are trickling out this evening. If the settlement is approved, eligible Connecticut ebook buyers would receive up to $1.26 million in total compensation, for example, while Washington ebook buyers would receive up to $2 million, Maryland ebook buyers would receive up to $1.64 million and Hawaii ebook buyers would receive up to $300,000. In addition, the settling publishers would pay $7.5 million in court fees.

How will consumers be paid? Baltimore’s ABC News reports that “in most cases, consumers may choose to receive the value of their restitution by check or by crediting the amount to future purchases of e-books. E-book retailers Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo have agreed to identify and contact each eligible customer by email.  Retailers Google and Sony will also notify affected customers. Sony will inform customers that checks will automatically be issued. Google customers will be directed to submit a claim on a settlement website.”

Payments are set to begin 30 days after the settlement’s approval.

The Department of Justice’s proposed settlement with HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, which is vehemently opposed by many in the book publishing industry and related fields, is still awaiting approval from U.S. District Judge Denise Cote. The DOJ received 868 public comments on the proposed settlement, with the majority of them against it. Cote has granted Barnes & Noble, the American Booksellers Association, the Authors Guild and attorney and music industry executive Bob Kohn, all of whom oppose the settlement, permission to act as “friends of the court” and weigh in on the settlement in amici curiae briefs.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Mohd Hasmi Hamidi.

I’ve seen Facebook sharing of digital content from an e-reader in the past, but as an Evernote user, this feature intrigues me:

“For the first time, Reader is combining features from Evernote to allow users to save their favorite web content to enjoy any time. Evernote’s Web Clipper allows saving content with a click, and pages saved with Evernote Clearly are optimized for Reader’s crisp E-Ink display. Favorite passages can also be annotated on Reader and saved back to Evernote for viewing later on any smartphone, tablet or PC.”

Adding Evernote support is a smart move by Sony and I anticipate others — namely, Amazon and Barnes & Noble — to follow with expanded sharing or web clipping options. Moving content to the cloud for later consumption on nearly any device is just one of the benefits brought by Evernote and it makes sense: Why read a long web page on a device that’s not optimized for the activity when you can clip it and read later on a better display? Likewise, the reverse option is appealing: I often use Evernote Clearly to clip the text of web pages and could use the new Sony Reader to view them later.

With the PRS-T2, Sony is also throwing in a free voucher for an e-book copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone through a partnership with Pottermore, making the Potter pot, that much sweeter for its new Reader.

To start, the three library systems using the program are Colorado’s Douglas County libraries, California-based library network Califa and Internet Archive’s free online library Open Library. In order to work with Library Direct, the libraries have to operate their own ebook lending systems. (Smashwords works separately with digital library distributors Baker & Taylor and 3M Cloud.)

On its blog, Smashwords explains how Library Direct works:

Previously, most libraries relied upon published reviews to guide their acquisition decisions. Under the Smashwords model, the curation is crowdsourced based on aggregated retail sales data drawn from across the Smashwords distribution network which includes the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBookstore and others.

Qualifying libraries can select from the top 10,000, 20,000 or any other large number of titles, and can custom-filter the titles by category and price range.

Douglas County, Califa and Open Library will each acquire “some variation” of Smashwords’ top-10,000 bestselling titles, with the three deals totaling around $100,000.

About 45,000 authors and indie publishers work with Smashwords. They can opt out of Library Direct, but they won’t know if their book has been included in the program until it shows up in their Sales and Payment report. “We don’t reveal sales rank on the site, though I suppose now might be a good time to reconsider that,” Smashwords founder and CEO Mark Coker acknowledged in the comments.

Separately, Smashwords officially launched a pricing tool that lets authors set custom pricing for libraries. (Coker told me this feature was coming at BEA.) Of 150 Smashwords authors who completed a survey, over half said they would make their books available to libraries either for free or for a price lower than retail.