Will the Harry Potter Leak Bring the Deathly Hallows to Book Sales?
Okay, I have no idea what “the deathly hallows” means but I’m guessing if deployed correctly by the right (no doubt) nefarious hands, they could have a detrimental effect on book sales.
The New York Times reported yesterday that sightings of the seventh and final Harry Potter epic, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, were beginning to pop up around the Internet in the form of a collection of photographs of every single page of the seven hundred and something page novel.
The leak is even more widespread today, as might be expected, as file sharing service BitTorrent has become a platform to share the novel. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing reports that not only is the book becoming widely available, but the novel was translated into German in a mere 45 hours.
As a side note, I’m surprised that Boing Boing would openly link to a site where Deathly Hallows torrents are available, in a sense supporting the illegal distribution of the as yet not-for-sale book. I’m not familiar with Boing Boing’s or Doctorow’s stance on intellectual property, so perhaps it complies with some kind of overarching policy of theirs.
In any event, the question is whether or not it will hurt book sales. Bruce Schneier thinks that people who are willing to read photographs of a novel are the same people who will later go out and purchase it. Don Park counter argues – and I think he has a very interesting point here – that getting something for free can be habit-forming.
Almost all of the so called copies of the final book floating around on torrent sites are actually a pdf of a fanfic that someone wrote.
I doubt Rowling has anything to be worried about. Yes, free stuff is nice, but I don’t know any serious readers who would prefer reading photographed pages on a computer monitor to holding a book in their hands. Also, I wouldn’t discount the “completist” factor — most Potter fans likely have all the other books in hand and will want this one to complete the collection.
Amazon should have my copy on my doorstep on the publication date — until then, I’m just avoiding the spoilers like the plague.
Rohan – Very interesting! Doctorow seems to have gotten his hands on a legit copy at the least, which means others doubtless have as well. However, maybe there’s effect a la KaZaa several years back (not sure if it’s still happening these days) where music companies flooded the file sharing service with garbled versions or short clips from popular illegally traded albums?
Lisa – Thanks for coming on by! I agree entirely that Rowling has nothing to worry about, but a Salon.com columnist noted that we have reached the end of the era where artists can control the release of their work to the world.
I’ll be in line for the book on Friday night photos or not. I know a lot of people who will be. I don’t think that reading a book online will ever replace the feel of a book in your hands. Like Lisa said.
I’m one of those people who downloaded the photos, and I have already read them all. I’ll still will be right there to buy the book Friday night at midnight, though. My intentions for reading the one on the internet weren’t anything bad. It wasn’t to get something for nothing, or to blurt out spoilers. I just wanted to know what happened.
I will still buy it, for many reasons. After all, maybe the one online was just an elaborate fake (I doubt it, though). And there was a page that was way too blurry for me to make out completely. I think most of the people who downloaded it are probably like me, and they will be right out there buying a copy with all of the people who waited, completely indistinguishable from the people who haven’t read it yet.
Katie – I agree personally, but I wonder if young people 10 or 20 years from now will feel the same.
Emily – I’m curious if you feel any kind of let down in reading the story before most of the rest of the world got the opportunity? I can imagine that happening to me were I in your shoes.
And that’s a crazy notion, reading the entire Book 7 (yet another long one at that) and then finding out it was fan fiction!