Press Release

Javelin Group celebrates the launch of new Pottermore e-books website in Japanese.

pottermore_websiteLondon, 31 July 2012. Javelin Group, Europe’s leading retail and omni-channel consultancy and systems integrator, is delighted to celebrate the launch of the Japanese version of the JK Rowling’s Pottermore Shop (shop.pottermore.com).

The technical build of the Pottermore Shop was led by Javelin Group, with the Japanese version being the newest addition to the pioneering multilingual, multicurrency Pottermore Shop site. The shop launched three months ago and sells digital versions of the full range of Harry Potter books, in English (UK and US versions), Spanish, French, German, Italian and now Japanese. The e-books and digital audio books are watermarked to personalise each edition and the Japanese e-books can be downloaded onto any EPUB3 compatible reader.

Julian Thomas, CTO of Pottermore said: “We are extremely pleased to make the Pottermore Shop available in Japanese, adding support for payments in Yen, and publishing the Harry Potter stories as vertical text e-books using EPUB3. Since its launch, the Pottermore Shop has attracted a huge number of Harry Potter fans, as well as those new to Harry Potter. We chose Javelin Group to support us in developing the Shop, due to its proven experience in developing large scale transactional websites for retailers, and we have continued to engage the firm for the on-going website development including the new Japanese site. The Javelin Group team has delivered a challenging and innovative project on time , enabling us to continue to meet our ambitions of enhancing the Shop alongside the unique online Harry Potter experience Pottermore.com. We are delighted with this development of our ecommerce site and we are looking forward to sharing it with the Harry Potter fans in Japan.”

Fraser Davidson, director of Javelin Group said: “We are delighted to be working with Pottermore and the most successful book series in history on this ground-breaking project. We have developed a pioneering international ecommerce website, which includes a unique digital download and watermarking solution across several languages, and has the ability to support a wide variety of digital audio and e-book reading devices, therefore allowing the Harry Potter e-books to be accessible to all.”

All seven Harry Potter books are available as e-books and digital audio books from the Pottermore Shop website in English (UK and US versions), Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. The website was built on the Intershop ecommerce platform and includes bespoke enhancements developed by Javelin Group such as the ability to push out each purchased e-book to most leading e-reading services, which are used by numerous devices including tablets, e-readers and smartphones (Japanese e-books are currently only supported by EPUB3 compatible readers and apps), allowing Harry Potter fans a flexible approach to the digital reading experience. Personalised digital audio books can be downloaded to numerous MP3 compatible devices including tablets, smartphones and MP3 players.

Find out more about eCommerce Development with Javelin Group.


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For more information, please contact marketing@javelingroup.com.