Earlier this evening, Sony announced the latest product in its partnership with J.K. Rowling: Book of Spells. It’s a video game that includes new material written by Rowling.
Yes, info you’ve been wishing for years would be placed in a Harry Potter Encyclopedia can now be yours through a video game and hundreds of dollars worth of equipment.
Book of Spells will include lots of new details about all of the incantations we read about in the Harry Potter books. During the live demo at E3, we even heard that we’ll learn how wizards discovered the Wingardium Leviosa spell. Sounds fantastic! That’s classic Jo material fans will want to know.
But there’s a catch. You need a Playstation 3. You need a Playstation Wonderbook. You need a Playstation Eye. And you need a Playstation Move controller. Oh, and the Book of Spells game itself.
That’ll easily put you at over $300 – a far cry from, say, a $30 Encyclopedia written by Rowling and found in your local bookstore.
Oh Sony, you just had to ruin the fun for us. Now that you’ve got Rowling tethered to you via a finely printed contract, our Queen (who we believe should have a Diamond Jubilee of her own) is releasing new Harry Potter material through ways that fans don’t want.
What do the fans want? A printed book that lets them shut off their computer screens and relax. You know, that lovely non-electronic device we used for the release of all seven Harry Potter books. The last thing we want is to be forced to discover new material via a television screen and $300+ worth of equipment. We spend enough time looking at our computer screens every day. We don’t want to continue our magical journey, originally travelled via book, with Sony.
I’m not sure who to be disappointed at most. Is Sony or Rowling/her people to blame here? She introduced a generation to reading, and is now forcing us to stare at screens for the goods. And like Pottermore, Book of Spells is catering to the kids – not the young adults and adults who’ve grown up with Potter over the past 15 years.
Sure, the information found in Book of Spells will be spread on the Internet. But it’s a true shame that we can’t enjoy new Harry Potter material the way we had originally fell in love with it: by opening up a book.
Let’s hope this is the last arm of the Sony/Rowling partnership.
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.