Harry Potter ebooks will disappear from Pottermore at the end of January

If you’ve ever purchased ebooks on Pottermore, you might want to go double-check that you’ve downloaded them to your hard drive. The Harry Potter site — which has been around for more than a decade now — is removing all digital books from its platform on January 31.

Pottermore has been emailing customers to let them know about the change in service, The Verge reports. The site’s online store ceased book sales in September, but users were not told at that point that their existing purchases would soon be inaccessible.

Downloads of Pottermore-bound copies of the Harry Potter books are reportedly being completed as DRM-free .epub files, so owners will be able to easily import them to just about any e-reader or software of their choice. This is a luxury not afforded to those who have more recently purchased the ebooks through Amazon.

The Pottermore nuisance — Pottermore, first marketed as a way for fans of the Harry Potter series to engage with extended content, quickly became a way for J.K. Rowling to hoard her intellectual property behind a wall. This makes sense, in hindsight, given that Rowling is now known as the premiere gatekeeper for gender studies. (She’s a TERF, is what we mean.)

The Harry Potter series was not available in digital form, despite its intense popularity, until Pottermore opened its Shop section in 2012. Upon their release, the Harry Potter ebooks could only be purchased through Pottermore. No matter which company made your e-reader, you’d have to create a Pottermore account to access Rowling’s novels.

Gone in a blink — By limiting Harry Potter ebook purchases to Pottermore, the site ensured it maintained complete control of Rowling’s digital assets. That choice also means anyone who purchased those ebooks is now about to lose them forever, unless they happen to read this email from the site. Pottermore decided it wasn’t worth the server space and customers end up with the short end of the situation.

Any Pottermore book purchases can be downloaded in .epub format through the end of January. If you forget to do so, for some reason, the ebooks are pretty easy to come by in various digital bookshops (and via less-legal routes, which have the added benefit of not supporting Rowling’s transphobia).