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Much Ado About Nothing: Few Fans Protest New Pottermore Presents eBooks

short-stories-from-hogwarts-harry-potterIt is axiomatic that some fans will always be unhappy about any new work from their favorite creator, and the recently published Pottermore Presents ebooks are no exception to the rule.

The Telegraph published a story yesterday which claims that a noteworthy number of fans are protesting the three new ebooks:

However, although Pottermore promised “original, never-seen-before” writing from Rowling would comprise certain chapters, there is little that fans have not known before. The majority of the chapter on Hogwarts teacher, and later headteacher, Professor McGonagall, can still be found on the Pottermore website, with just 660 words written anew by the author.

While the other “original” chapters from Rowling on Professor Slughorn, the man who gave Lord Voldemort his lethal secret and Animagi, those humans who can transform into animals, don’t exist on Pottermore, they are not full of entirely new information, either – zealous fans have compiled similar accounts from previous Rowling and Pottermore publications on sites such as the Harry Potter Wiki page.

Readers were quick to notice the lack of new information in the books after their release. One posted on Twitter: “is it me, or is there not that much new info in the HP shorts that isn’t already on Pottermore for free?”. Another prompted Rowling to response after asking: “why would y’all make info already available for free on pottermore into ebooks?”

There’s a problem with The Telegraph’s story: hardly any fans are protesting the books.

A quick check of the the Amazon listings for the three new e-Shorts (one, two, three) shows that the majority of fans have left positive reviews. The ebooks were only released a couple days ago, but so far the reviews follow the expected pattern for satisfied fans: 5-star reviews outnumber 4-star reviews, which outnumbers 3-star reviews, and so on.

new-harry-potter-book-reviews

Also, there are almost no 1-star reviews.

In contrast, we can look at reviews for the Cursed Child script book on Amazon and see that a significant number of fans were deeply unhappy about the book.

That book has more 1-star reviews than 2-star, 3-star, or 4-star reviews.

For the record, this is what it looks like when unhappy fans feel a work did not meet their expectations.

new-harry-potter-book-reviews

Rather than a huge number of protests, the real story today is that some fans are questioning the value of the ebooks and whether the content should have been culled from Pottermore.

I don’t mean to disrespect anyone’s opinions, but that is a fairly standard point of debate among fans.

It is not really newsworthy.

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Comments


Frank September 8, 2016 um 3:32 pm

Negative news gets more clicks than positive news and people are free to read the stories on Pottermore, while it is hard to use most of the content is there.

I was disappointed by Cursed Child.


Eli September 8, 2016 um 3:37 pm

Basically, you can cull ten tweets about any subject and write an article claiming "People are upset by…"

Nate Hoffelder September 8, 2016 um 3:40 pm

Pretty much.


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