J.K. Rowling fans don't waste any time when tickets to see the author go on sale -- even if they are not technically on sale yet.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center ticketing system was breached in what was presumably the first time it was really put to the test (Wynton Marsalis is popular, but not that popular).

Unauthorized tickets to watch Ms. Rowling read from her new, adult novel The Casual Vacancy went on sale on September 9 – a full 12 hours before they were supposed to.

Which means a lot of excited fans bought fake tickets.

But a change in venue means that nobody (who already bought tickets, that is) will be denied access. The October 16 reading, which has obviously sold out by now, was relocated to the 2,586-seat David H. Koch theatre . Those who jumped the gun and bought illegitimate tickets will be contacted by Jazz at Lincoln Center in order to get real tickets, Publisher's Lunch reported today.

“Although neither Little, Brown and Company nor J.K. Rowling are responsible for this situation they were keen to make sure that no person who legitimately bought a ticket was left disappointed, are delighted this matter has been resolved in this way, and apologize for any confusion that may have been caused in the meantime,” Jazz at Lincoln Center wrote in an email to The Observer. Ticket holders who purchased prematurely will be contacted by Jazz at Lincoln Center in order to swap the fakes for new, real tickets to the new location.

Although the reading may be less intimate now, the change in venue leads to a happy outcome for all -- especially Lincoln Center and J.K. Rowling, who presumably get to keep the extra cash.

Not that anybody had any doubts about J.K. Rowling's ability to climb the besteller list, but this snafu bodes extremely well for book sales.

"After looking closely at all the information that we've gathered, we have decided to further extend the Beta period so we can improve Pottermore before giving more people access," said an announcement on the Pottermore blog. "This means the site will not be opening to new users in the immediate future, but please know that we will open registration as soon as we can."

Last month, Charlie Redmayne, formerly chief digital officer at HarperCollins, announced he was leaving the book publisher to become CEO of Pottermore.

The Observer

Also, after we filled out a quiz and were assigned a wand made of a wood most often favored by practitioners of the Dark Arts we were too scared to proceed to the sorting hat. What if it puts us in Slytherin? We'll keep you posted.

J.K. Rowling initially intended the site to be fully operational by the end of this month, but a recent update has announced that the Pottermore shop, where e-book versions of Harry Potter will be sold exclusively, will not open until some time in the first half of 2012.

Pottermore more more.

The Observer is still awaiting our welcome e-mail from Pottermore, but today was the first day a lucky few users got to go explore J.K. Rowling's interactive Potter experience. So far reviews are favorable. Entertainment Weekly reports:

"Those who were worried that this would be just the skeletal frame of a game used to sell audiobooks or ebooks or plush sorting hats or whatever: it’s not. Even though the site is currently limited to material relating to the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, there’s still more than enough to make your entire afternoon disappear like a temporus suckus spell."

And The Guardian tells us what new entrants get to do when they arrive:

On entering the site, users begin to travel through the world of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, following in the footsteps of Harry and learning new facts about his world as they open an account at the goblin bank Gringotts, travel up and down Diagon Alley shopping for equipment for school and choosing a wand. Unlocking new content as they progress through the storyline, they can click on and collect items for their "trunk", build and evolve their profiles, adding their own drawings, collecting books and chocolate frog cards, learning spells and brewing potions. A Pottermore account can also be connected to a Facebook account, with users able to make friends – and even take part in wizarding duels once they reach a certain point on the website.

We will keep you updated about all the chocolate frog cards we collect when we get in. Until then!

A scene from the Hogwarts Express on Pottermore.

The problem with looking to J.K. Rowling for inspiration about how to transition a book franchise into the digital era is that no author can really be compared to J.K. Rowling.

“She’s kind of like the Oprah of children’s books,” said Lorraine Shanley, co-founder of Market Partners International, which consults on digital books.

“I mean, she’s the Beatles,” said Mike Shatzkin, CEO of the Idea Logical Company, another book futurist.

“Everything about J.K. Rowling is unique to J.K. Rowling,” affirmed Kyle Good, a publicist for Scholastic, which publishes the Harry Potter series in America.

So when J.K. Rowling announced that she would bypass retailers and exclusively sell the digital editions of the books herself, luring customers into her online bookshop by creating an elaborate online fantasmagoria called Pottermore, the prevailing sentiment in publishing—in sharp contrast to that of the reading public—was indifference.

“I think the important point about Pottermore is that this is not something we need to worry about lots and lots of people doing,” said Mr. Shatzkin.

“Think about all the money they must be spending to do this!” said Bob Stein, who founded the Institute for the Future of the Book. “It’s the franchise that permits it.”

Pottermore, for those who didn’t receive the owl, will be launched by J.K. Rowling in October, with a beta version for a select million die-hards being tested over the next few weeks. The site will be the sole retail outlet from which readers can purchase digital versions of the Harry Potter books, which have previously been available in digital format only as illegal bootlegs. To encourage her readers/customers to forego the book store in favor of a specific shopping trip to Pottermore, Ms. Rowling and her business partner, Sony, have recreated key scenes of the first book as a digital “interactive environment” and initially included some 18,000 words of new writing that will provide greater detail and background about the world of Harry Potter (which, we might point out, is only about the length of three New Yorker stories). They also orchestrated an elaborate build-up that has whipped Harry Potter nerds into an anticipatory frenzy.

The first clues appeared on Harry Potter fan sites on June 15. They came in the form of geographical coordinates, posted at sites called Mugglenet, the Leaky Cauldron, Snitch Seeker and others. The coordinates, when entered into a site called Secret Street View, corresponded with 10 locations, including Salem, Mass., King’s Cross Station in London and New Orleans. Each street view page was superimposed with a letter, which, as the fans decoded, eventually spelled out “more Potter”—or, as it turned out, “Pottermore.” The fans freaked out—a new book!—but they were wrong: no new book, at least not now, just a web site called Pottermore, and what that was, nobody knew. An ad campaign posted online and broadcast in Times Square announced only that “the owls are gathering.” The animated owls—great horned, snowy, barn (screech? burrowing? spotted?)—turned out to be congregating on the branches of a special Pottermore channel on YouTube that had a countdown to an announcement scheduled for June 23.

On that day, Ms. Rowling appeared on the channel in a video to describe “an online reading experience unlike any other.” Seated on a leather couch in a softly lit room and speaking over tinkling piano music, Ms. Rowling thanked her fans for their undying love and then, as an exquisitely animated paper owl took flight from the pages of a Harry Potter book, she described the new site.

“Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of author and reader work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader,” said Ms. Rowling, in lulling tones. She announced that the site will include material that she’s “been hoarding for years” about the details of the wizarding world and be a place for users to post their own interpretations of Harry and his friends. Users will also interact with what the digital marketers are calling “key story moments.” In the storyline for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone they will be assigned a house by the sorting hat, be able to mix potions and go shopping for their own wand and compete with their friends for a house cup by playing games (one of which appears from the previews to be plain old chess). Environments from the other books will follow, with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets launching on the site in 2012. Visitors will also, of course and most importantly, be able to shop.

Rowling.

When it comes to converting the Harry Potter series for e-books, J.K. Rowling is relatively late to the game. She is a long-established advocate for print and paper, but Ms. Rowling said in a recent BBC interview that her leisurely pace in releasing the books in electronic form was less a symptom of committed atavism than a result of being too busy.

“One of the reasons I resisted doing e-books for so long was I couldn’t cope with anything else,” she told the BBC, adding that she had bought a Kindle a year ago. “The decision as to when to do it, how to do it, just seemed like one thing I could defer. I was more interested in writing the books.” (Presumably, the wild success of the books in print form tempered the urgency, as well.)

Traditional bookstores would thank her for not having rushed in, but now, with her empire complete, the movies all made and the generation that first read Harry Potter old enough to have children of their own, the time had come to find a way to make Harry Potter new again for young readers. Thanks to the era in which she signed her early books deals (the first one sold here in 1998), Ms. Rowling also retained the digital rights to her properties, a feat that would be difficult to accomplish today. And while a less savvy businesswoman might have dusted her hands of the matter and simply turned over e-book publishing to Scholastic, Ms. Rowling did not reach the point of selling 15 million books on a single day, with hundreds of millions of books over all, driving a movie franchise that has grossed $7.3 billion dollars worldwide, by being anything less than meticulous. She has said in the past, however, that if she had retained control of the movie rights she would have tried to avoid merchandising, so her website will not necessarily be an online emporium for Halloween costumes, butterbeer and quidditch brooms.

Even more surprisingly, Ms. Rowling did not turn her back on her publishers: Bloomsbury (in England), Scholastic (in America) and her other publishers will get a cut of the regional editions of her e-books. When asked why Ms. Rowling would not claim all e-book profits for herself, the representative for her American publisher framed it as a sort of altruistic act. “The author decided to acknowledge us for all of our contributions,” said Ms. Good.

But others contend that it wasn’t just that. According to Mike Shatzkin, contracts that preceded consciousness about digital rights tend to be ambiguous, but on the publishing side they usually contained a noncompete clause.

“An e-book would pretty clearly constitute competition for a print book,” said Mr. Shatzkin. While a legal precedent has yet to be established on the matter, one argument for why Ms. Rowling gave her publishers a cut of royalties might be that the noncompete cause would constitute legal grounds for her publishers to sue her. “There would have been the possibility of a nasty dispute if she had not done something that cut them in,” he said. Furthermore, he added, Ms. Rowling might want to write another print book (despite some hints to the contrary) and she would likely want to link any future projects with past ones by maintaining her relationship with her publishers.

“I don’t mean to suggest that it wasn’t generous, but it also wasn’t totally spontaneous,” he said.

As for other interactive book sites, Pottermore may be unique, and potentially inimitable, but it isn’t alone in its effort to engage readers in the virtual space—and thereby to sell books. Scholastic has produced an interactive book site called The 39 Clues, which augments a series of books with online games and collectible cards. Since its launch in 2008, it has been a major success, with more than 1.6 million registered users, more than 10 million copies of the accompanying books in print, foreign rights sold to 25 countries and film rights optioned to Dreamworks. The site has also banked on the services of big-name writers—David Baldacci and the bestselling children’s writer Gordon Korman will both be writing books for the series.

HarperCollins, for its part, has had success with an interactive book site for teenage girls called the Amanda Project. Like Pottermore, the site is an interactive environment accompanied by a book series, billing itself as “the first collaborative, interactive fiction series for girls aged 13 and up.” Unlike Pottermore, users of the site insert themselves as characters in the mystery of Amanda Valentino, a mysterious new arrival at a school who then goes missing. Some of these user-generated characters are then picked up by the series’ writers and inserted into the actual books. Also unlike Pottermore, the Amanda Project is not an online bookstore—to actually buy the books, users click out through a long list of participating bookstores.

While users of Pottermore will be able to upload “their comments, thoughts and artwork,” the site will not be a forum for fan fiction, a place to chat with friends or social network or a crowd-sourced literary experiment.

“The best way to think of Pottermore is as an interactive, illustrated companion to the books,” read a post on the official Pottermore blog, making fans “able to experience Harry’s story in a new way and discover all the additional information that J.K. Rowling has written.” And while few book futurists think that J.K. Rowling is indicative of a trend, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Bob Stein did have one concern:

“What I get scared about is that the only thing any major publisher will want to do is swing to the fences so they can make a Harry Potter-type franchise and generate the kind of profits that Harry Potter did that enabled them to create something like Pottermore,” he said.

ewitt@observer.com

Rowling earns her bling.

After the newest Harry Potter movie shattered box office records, The Telegraph reports that Barry Meyer, the chief executive of Warner Brothers, gifted J.K. Rowling with an antique diamond bracelet. It's very sweet of him because as the richest woman in Britain she really can't afford silly baubles.

As Letters of Note proves, however, J.K. Rowling really does care about her fans.

And Sady Doyle wonders, what if J.K. Rowling had made Hermione Granger "the girl who lived"? (Via Kottke)

Radcliffe.

This is it, kids. Absolutely, positively the end of the Harry Potter series. I feel good about that, knowing I will never have to sit through another installment. The franchise that started 10 years ago and seems more like 10 lifetimes ago has at last written an ultimate “The End.” I’ve outgrown Lilliputian witches and goblins with flying broomsticks, and so have they. With boobs, hairy armpits and other star-making accoutrements, the time has come for them to pursue headier goals, like Broadway musicals and Vogue covers.

But before we wave adieu, let it be said that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the eighth and final installment, goes out with Fourth of July fireworks. For dedicated children who are aging along with the spellbinding midget warlocks they adore, a new Harry Potter movie is always a call to arms. They won’t be disappointed in this one. The three heroes are as panting and breathless as Liza Minnelli, and even to an aging Muggle like me, the movie makes sense for a change. As boring and deadly as the last one was, it’s now obvious why director David Yates and ace screenwriter Steve Kloves (let’s pray that with Harry out of his system, this fine craftsman will get back to serious business of writing superior scripts, like his Wonder Boys, Flesh and Bone and The Fabulous Baker Boys) put us all to sleep with the plodding narrative details in Part 1. They were saving the best for last.

You still need a deep foundation in J.K. Rowling’s fertile Potter history to make sense of the mystery Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) must at last solve in th e spectacular battle to save Hogwarts, continue fighting against evil, discover the missing horcrux and save the world from Lord Voldemort. The book devoted hundreds of pages to the final resolution, which is why it had to be divided into two films instead of one. (They also needed extra time and double the budget to perfect the myriad digitally mastered 3-D special effects that magically unfold before your eyes in Part 2 like an exploding theme park.) Mercifully, the film wastes no time cutting straight to the chase as the kids gather in an underground hideout to plan their strategy to seek and destroy the remaining horcruxes, which are the wands made of unicorn hairs and the heartstring of a dragon that make Lord Voldemort invincible. The goblin Griphook leads them to the first one, hidden deep inside a bank vault, where the first effective use of 3-D hits you right between the eyes on an underground railway that looks like a ride on the Cyclone at Coney Island. Escaping over the rooftops on the back of a flying, fire-breathing monster, Harry has two of the wands that make up the Deathly Hallows. In order to save his life and destroy the forces of darkness, he must locate the third, called the “elder wand,” which Voldemart needs to rule the world. The search takes you on an adventure full of unprecedented thrills that will take your breath away.

Everyone returns, including the brother and dead sister of the beloved Professor Dumbledore, who live in an oil painting, and even the ghost of Dumbledore himself, played once again by Michael Gambon. Hogwarts is now in the malevolent hands of the sinister Severus Snape (hissing, sniveling Alan Rickman), who is holding students and staff hostage as they wait for Harry to rescue them. The walls and platforms that hold up Hogwarts crumble and collapse like Tinker Toys in a masterpiece of destruction, turning the school of magic into the world’s most colossal rubbish heap. A humongous man-eating snake with fangs that strike the audience in 3-D almost devours Hermione, while Ron narrowly escapes a cauldron of flames on a broomstick. With Hogwarts gone and almost every member of the cast killed off by Voldemort, there could obviously never be another installment. But there’s still time for tender-hearted Professor Minerva McGonagell (Maggie Smith) to save the day with a spell she’s been waiting for years to try. There is even a flashback that explains the sinister role Snape played in Harry’s life story that I found unexpectedly touching. The only thing left to do to bring this saga to a heart-stopping conclusion is for Harry to enter the forbidden forest of death like a true hero and face his destiny with Voldemort, played one last time by the hatchet-faced Ralph Fiennes, who actually shows his human side for the first time. Frankly, I’m sorry to see him go.

None of it makes one lick of sense and a lot of the dialogue is pure jabberwocky, decipherable only by those who know the books by heart. This includes billions of rabid fans, so I don’t think anyone is even slightly worried that a little formality like incoherence will affect the box office. The movie never wore out my patience like Part 1 did, because the awesome effects take over where the plot used to be, and although this is the end, my guess is that it will fire the imagination for years to come. What fun to feel like a kid again. I had a marvelous time.

rreed@observer.com

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2

Running time 130 minutes

Written by Steve Kloves

Directed by David Yates

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman

3/4

[R. L. Stine at 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 8:15 p.m., www.92y.org; Red Sky at Night, Sailor’s Delight Fall Fund-Raiser, the Frying Pan, Pier 63, West 23rd Street, 8 p.m., www.hudsonsailing.org; Obama concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom, 8:30 p.m., 212-763-4850]

mbryan@observer.com

The book will be published Dec. 4 by Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in America. Amazon also plans a leather-bound collectors' edition that will sell for $100.

The book, written and illustrated by Ms. Rowling, is a collection of five wizard tales referred to in her Harry Potter series, according to the Associated Press. Her charity, Children's High Level Group, hopes to raise $8 million through sales.

Ms. Rowling told the AP that the books will include her illustrations and introduction, the stories themselves and commentaries ostensibly by Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of the fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, "which appear by generous permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters' Archive."

Video and full text of her speech is available at Harvard Magazine's site.