Deep Throat Discount breaks story on Nixon Potter!
I wanted to track everything down and verify it myself before blogging about this one, so you can be sure I'm not working from rumors, biased sources, single sources, or doctored photos.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows can currently be downloaded using BitTorrent through at least one torrent tracker, and has been there since at least July 17th in the form of digital photos taken of each of the book's pages. Claims that the manuscript only goes up to page 495 and claims that it's really a piece of fanfiction faked onto the pages through photoshop or a similar program are false. I've tracked down and examined the file, and it is undoubtedly the real Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Needless to say, Scholastic has not taken this lightly. Millions have been spent on preventing any kind of early release of the book (another factor leading to doubts that the manuscript is real).
At first, it wasn't clear how this could have happened. My best guess was that the culprit had to be someone who worked in close proximity with copies of the book (which could be a lot of people, from employees of Scholastic to any of the thousands of bookstores carrying it, to somebody in the warehouse at a distributor like Ingram or Baker & Taylor). However, yesterday it surfaced that an online bookshop called Deepdiscount.com had sent copies out ahead of schedule, with as many as 1,200 arriving in preorderers' maliboxes on--yep--July 17th. Scholastic has filed a lawsuit against the company that owns Deepdiscount.com.
One of the more interesting takes I've seen on this came from PublishersLunch: "It's also fascinating that emphasis in press coverage is not that the entire manuscript has been pirated and is available for free online--which it is--but that spoilers are available."
At a time like this, every world publishing house that holds its region's rights to Harry Potter needs to kick things into overdrive; they need to start doing round-the-clock damage control to eliminate the problems caused by this leak, which will kill all their carefully laid plans for the book's release in their tracks if left unattended.
Not.
Contrary to PublishersLunch, the thing I find most fascinating about this incident is the number of people who don't care. Potter fans who I talk to are horrified at the idea of "cheating" online with a pirated e-copy that's difficult to read. As discouraging as it is for a publisher to spend millions containing possible leak points, their concerns over this strike me as a Grinch scenario. As in:
And the grinch, with greedy grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?
It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes, or bags!"
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.
Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!"
I'd be surprised if this incident cuts, even insignificantly, into any of the vogue surrounding the book's release, or the sales of the books itself. When it comes to this point, people just want their midnight release parties, their 789-page hardcovers with fancy artwork, the awe, the experience, and most of all, the community. I've seen people who have read the pirated copy, but never anyone who has decided not to buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because it's already been spoiled in a pirated edition. Even the people who post the torrents urge their downloaders to "Go out and buy the book!"
I'm not sure whether the publishers should find that encouraging or discouraging: millions down the toilet--and in the end, for something they don't even seem to need to worry about.
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