Pottermore Discusses Content of New ‘Pottermore Presents’ eBooks

This week, Pottermore revealed the newest ebooks to be released in the Potter-verse. Speaking to director of product, creative and content at Pottermore, Anna Rafferty, they discuss how the collections in the books were curated.

The ebooks are actually compiled writings from Pottermore, with two of the books containing new, unpublished material from J.K. Rowling. One such piece is a specially designed illustration page by MinaLima, along with new information about Professor McGonagall, found in Pottermore Presents: Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies:

With each exploring different concepts, the books show just how much content is available on Pottermore!

“It’s been a wonderful curation exercise,” Anna told us. “We read through everything in our archives, took pieces written by J.K. Rowling and the Pottermore editorial team, and sewed it all together – from the delicious little snippets of wizarding world lore, to the longer narratives on characters and magical phenomena, and categories of themed miscellany started to emerge in our thinking.”

Anna also explains how the books approach the different ‘parts’ of the wizarding world:

“The collections are very deliberately not segmented into binary poles of ‘goodies and baddies’ – the wizarding world, and the characters within it, are more nuanced than that”

“We preferred to explore shades of grey and collected the writing around politics and power, or everyday heroism. So much of the joy of working with J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world is in its richness – heroic characters have secret weaknesses, power seduces even the kindest of souls and some magical hardships, like lycanthropy, seem almost impossible to bear.”

The ebooks were made to give fans of Harry Potter a way to access Pottermore without the internet:

‘We wanted to take jewels of writing that already exist on Pottermore and some that were still unpublished in the archives, surface and connect them in a way that’s easy for the reader to enjoy – and read offline, if they want! – and make the writing available in new places,’ Anna explained. ‘I think these collections do that beautifully.’

The ebooks are set to be published online on September 6th, read more over at Pottermore, here.