J.K. Rowling has adamantly refused, for years, to allow her “Harry Potter” books to be sold for the Kindle, the Nook, or in any e-book form, until now.

Coupled with Thursday’s launch of Pottermore, Rowling announced that all of her books would be available for all major e-book platforms, including the Kindle, directly through the new website.

The “Harry Potter” series has sold 450 million copies worldwide, and more will come with this development.

A beta of Pottermore launched in July, and the full site, with e-books, is expected up in October.

Rowling owns the digital rights to her boos, not U.K. publisher Bloomsbury Publishing, or Scholastic Inc., which owns the U.S. print rights. She is taking the bold step toward self-e-publishing, instead of brokering out the rights and selling the books through Amazon or the Apple iBookstore.

In a statement late last week, Amazon heralds the coming death of paper books. Can’t you hear it? Ever since e-book readers came on the market few years ago, e-books have slowly risen to over take paper books as the number one go to for books now a days.

Here are some bullet points from Amazon.com in regards to their news:

• Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
• So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon’s print book sales, [has] resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital. Free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.
• In the five weeks since its introduction, Kindle with Special Offers for only $114 is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family in the U.S.
• Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010
• Less than one year after introducing the UK Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, even as hardcover sales continue to grow. Since April 1, Amazon.co.uk customers are purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than 2 to 1.

What does this news eventually mean?  Paper books are becoming relics of a by-gone era and soon to be museum show-pieces to show our descendents how we read books. E-books are cheaper to create as well as buy, and you can receive them instantly once paid for which only makes sense as to its growing popularity. And that is why the future is upon us. Go forth and read.

Google is throwing its hat in the e-book ring, and per usual Google policy, they’re injecting their own “don’t be evil” spin on things. Whereas the book offerings of Amazon are well known for their Orwellian DRM restrictions that are available only on the Kindle, Google will offer its books free of any restrictions in an open format for all devices, from readers to mobile phones to computers.

Coming in early 2010, Google will open its e-book store with 50,000 titles. The books would be indexed and searchable via the Google Books site. This also means that purchasers will have access to the purchased books via a web interface as well as on their reading devices. Users’ browsers will also allow the books to be cached for offline reading using Google Gears.

While nothing official relating to Google’s new OS announced, a web-app for reading e-books fits in perfectly with Google’s plans to moving everything into a Chrome browser-OS-web application system. Also, there are many companies currently offering e-books that have been a round for a while, so Google is hardly new to the game. At the same time, e-books have yet to truly catch on yet.

We, of course, would like to think that this is only because Google wasn’t playing the game.