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Originally Posted by anamardoll
I know Pottermore has said ePubs, but I just don't see that working out in the long run to fulfill their stated goals,
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*Has* Pottermore said ePubs? I remember seeing it somewhere that seemed official but can't find it again. Because I also thought they said "watermarked," and I've never heard of "watermarked" ePubs. (Not that it couldn't be done, but it's not what anyone calls them.)
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not the least of which because the images and page layouts are going to be tricky. (How did the pirate versions manage? Are they all PDFs? I'm curious.) 
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Pirate editions of the image-heavy files like Beedle the Bard tend to be PDF; the others are available in pretty much every format, with "badly-OCR'd letter-sized no-text-formatting PDF" being the easiest to find. (Hmm. I should try to find out if the Carpet Edition is still available.)
The main announcement seems to only say the core 7 ebooks will be available; maybe they don't have plans for the Beedle, Quidditch & Monsters books. (I doubt this, though.) I don't expect them to be multiformat, because I don't expect them to devote any real site-space to explaining how ebook formats work. It'll be "click here to download your ebook" or "if you have a Kindle, click here to visit the convert-to-kindleformat page".
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Seems to me that they're either going to have to go with PDF (which will still not meet their stated goal because different readers read PDF differently), or they'll have to lock down the epub to prevent the watermark/margins/font removal, or they'll have to give up on controlling all readers everywhere into having the exact same experience with a book as everyone else. Which is a stupid goal anyway, imho tyvm. 
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An ePub could easily have a "hidden watermark" metadata field that gave the buyer's name; bootleg copies could be searched for that. And it could also have a splash page with the buyer's name, to encourage people to buy legit copies.
Hopefully, she or her marketing team realizes that, with all the books currently widely available in torrents, they're already competing with free content, and DRM isn't going to help them.
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If they DO go with PDF, the partnership with Sony readers makes more sense (best PDF reader on the market imho), but I don't think the fans will be happy. 
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It's just too much to hope for that they'll design PDFs to be read on 6" readers.
