For the last few days, a “Pottermore” website by J K Rowling has been the subject of scrutiny, with speculation that a Harry Potter smartphone was coming. Well, Pottermore is actually a website set up by J K Rowling and Sony, where the author will put up some ebooks (DRM free) of the Harry Potter series for sale as well as audiobooks, which will be available in several languages.

The website will be launched in October, with registrations starting on the 31st of July.

Apple recently announced that it was doing away with it’s unfair DRM copy protection. Awesome news. Going one step further, the company is giving anyone who’s ever bought songs on iTunes the ability to upgrade their music to DRM-free versions. For a fee of course. There is a catch. As Wilson Rothman over at Gizmodo discovered, you have to upgrade all of them at once.

That really sucks, because if you’ve been at it for awhile just downloading away over the years, you have a problem. Costs can easily be in the hundreds of dollars. There is no way to upgrade your titles individually. Things like this are why some of us don’t use the service. They’re going to make you pay again for songs you already bought? Nice one Apple.

Today in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Steve Jobs said that iTunes will be reducing the price of their DRM-free tracks from the current $1.29 down to 99 cents. These songs from iTunes were launched as iTunes Plus back in May and offered a number of titles, mostly from EMI, without any digital rights management restrictions. They also came in a little higher quality for a little more money with 256 kbps AAC encoding compared to the 128kbps encoding for the rest of the 99 cent versions. “It’s been very popular with our customers, and we’re making it even more affordable,” said Jobs in the interview.

This move brings Apple’s prices a little closer to those of Wal-Mart and Amazon who both offer song downloading services with DRM-free music with some titles going for less than 99 cents. This also will make iTunes slightly more desirable compared to new players coming into the online music game such as Doug Morris and Universal Music Group who are looking to make some competition for Apple in a different way.

Amazon.com went full steam into downloadable MP3s today, unveiling a beta version of Amazon MP3, its new digital music download store. Most songs will range in price from 89 to 99 cents, while albums will run you $5.99 to $9.99.

Amazon MP3 features over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. All downloads will be MP3s which are DRM-free, meaning there’s no restrictions on what device or music management software is used to play them. Songs can even be burned to CD.