IT ALL ENDS JULY 15

Seldom has a marketing slogan offered such direct insight into the Hollywood psyche. July 15 was, of course, the day Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 opened, concluding a decade of Potter movies with, as it turned out, an enormous bang — $481 million in weekend ticket sales worldwide, eclipsing all box-office records and leaving studio executives gasping for adjectives.

Clearly the slogan worked.

But the end of a $7 billion movie franchise for Warner Bros. was hardly the end for fans. In fact, you could just as well say “It all begins July 31.” That’s the day fans can register for Pottermore, the aptly named participatory website that J.K. Rowling announced last month.

When Rowling appeared at her press conference at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a Hogwartsian pile in West London, the big news was not, as generally reported, her decision to finally make the novels available as e-books. Yes, Rowling had long been the biggest holdout against electronic publishing, and yes, her decision to both publish and sell the books herself was a break with the way the industry does business.

But a challenge to existing business models, however radical, is minor compared to a wholesale rethinking of the art of fiction. And in announcing Pottermore, that’s what Rowling promised: an acknowledgment that the internet makes possible an entirely new form of narrative, one that readers can not only consume but explore and build upon.

What made Pottermore even more remarkable was its timing. Ten years ago, with the first of the Potter movies a few months from being released, the world of Potter fandom was riven by strife. The PotterWar — thus yclept by a London city councilman who leapt into the fray — pitted Warner Bros. against a citizen’s army of web-savvy kids. The movie studio was eager to protect the trademarks it had bought from Rowling; the kids were outraged that a giant corporation was threatening them with legal action for using the Potter name on websites they’d set up to celebrate the story.

In the end, it was no contest: As Heather Lawver, the 16-year-old leader of the insurrection, told Henry Jenkins for his book Convergence Culture, “They underestimated how interconnected our fandom was.” By the time the hapless company beat a retreat, it was being excoriated from British pulpits for placing children in its legal crosshairs.

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