Harry Potter is getting a makeover. The boy wizard's seven adventures, penned by JK Rowling, are being given new covers by publisher Bloomsbury this summer as it looks to recapture just a little of its magic.
The absence of a new Potter book left the publisher out of pocket last year, with profits down 35%, but announcing the company's annual results, the chief executive, Nigel Newton, said trading had been "excellent".
He added that the company was hoping to find space for digital editions of its books on Apple's iPad, due to go on sale in the US on Saturday and in the UK a few weeks later.
"It has not come to the UK yet, so that is a piece of business yet to happen, but I can certainly say that the iPad looks like a very exciting platform indeed," he said. "Obviously it is the most important development in ebooks in recent months, so we will certainly be talking to Apple."
Media companies have become increasingly excited about the potential of the iPad to enable them to increase their digital revenues. At launch, several newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times and Newsweek, will have iPad applications which users can download for a fee. Apple is also setting up the iBookstore for digital titles and has already signed up publishers Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Hachette. But last week Random House admitted it might not put its authors on the device because it fears the iPad could result in a sharp drop in the money it makes from ebooks.
Newton said Bloomsbury's ebook sales are soaring, although from a very low base, thanks in part to the release of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader, which came to the UK in October. Its bestselling etitle to date is My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands, by US comedian Chelsea Handler.
Overall, Bloomsbury saw revenues drop to £87m last year, from £100m in 2008 during which period the seventh and final Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was published in paperback. Annual profits of £7.7m were down from £11.85m. The company said trading since the end of last year has been "excellent" and it is hoping that films of some of its books, including Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang and Eat, Pray, Love, starring Julia Roberts, will help boost sales.
Bloomsbury has also been expanding into academic and specialist publishing, buying the Arden Shakespeare collection and the cricketer's bible Wisden to help boost sales in the post-Potter world. But the company cannot completely give up its infatuation with the boy wizard whose adventures it first published in 1997.
Newton said the arrival of the new covers for the seven books in July would be "a new look for a new generation of readers who did not grow up with the Harry Potter series coming out book by book".
Photograph: Frank May/EPA
