Online Media Cultist

During what should be the happiest and most triumphant moments of author JK Rowling’s career, there’s enough going on that she likely wouldn’t mind summoning her fictional dementors to wreck havoc on those who would challenge her wishes for the release of the seventh and final tome in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

First there was the news that copies of the book were leaked onto the Internet prior to its official sale date. In fact as of this moment you can illegally procure a copy of the novel in German from the Internet, but you can’t legally purchase a hardcover edition.

And what’s more, The New York Times has published an early review of Deathly Hallows, against Rowling’s wishes. And if that’s not enough, Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune notes that some dude already received his copy early from an eBay purchase, despite a $20 million effort to stifle leaks prior to the official sale date.

“I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children,” she said.

The reality is that the era when artists could control the distribution of their work on a grand scale has ended. Overall, this is a good thing. Music companies and television companies and media companies don’t have the power to tightly control what people listen to, watch, and read anymore. The choices are too many, which has shifted the power of distribution to the content creators and consumers. And of course, when there’s great demand for intellectual property, it’s simply easy to hold back the floodgates once a single copy makes it onto the Internet.

But in some cases, it’s a little bit sad. The vast majority of Potter fans want to be able to pick up their legally purchased book, knowing that a massive adventure lies ahead for which they have no prior knowledge. And there’s a collective joy in knowing that thousands or even millions of others are doing the same.

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.

The Internets went through a dark period a few short years back. In retrospect it looks a little bit like when people scoffed at that whole trendy-passing fad-driving-an-automobile-thing.

At the risk of making a creaky analogy, this “web 2.0″ era may be akin to the days of the production line and Ford’s Model T. In other words, these cars are here to stay, and are more popular than ever.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final of JK Rowling’s immensely popular series, has become Amazon’s most pre-ordered product of all time, already racking up 1.6 million orders. That’s before the book has even been released, kids.

I experienced the world wide web for the first time when I was in college, back at good old Binghamton University in New York. It seemed a fascinating and alien creature to me back then, and overall appeared to be a great way to search for (some kinds of) information and read (some of) the news, but wasn’t robust enough to do much more than that, at least in my view.

The older I get and the more the online world becomes ingrained in my life, making purchases and procuring services in the “real world” makes less and less sense to me in many ways. It amazes me how often I walk into a store with the purpose of buying an item, only to walk out of that same store, cash still in pocket, because the item wasn’t available, or the customer service I received was unsatisfactory, or the line was too long, and on and on.

Sure, I’m impatient (I’m originally from New York, what do you expect!). But it’s simply a no brainer that because the Internet can provide safe (as a matter of general perspective) transactions and the ability to purchase or access an amazing array of goods and services with no online taxes (at least thus far!) from the comfort of one’s home or office…

Harry Potter can come to you on the day that it’s released. Good times, and they’re here to stay.

After the seventh and final Harry Potter epic, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released on July 21st, millions around the world will be thrilled and subsequently saddened that there will be no further Potter adventures to look forward to. No one will be sadder, of course, than Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury, who will have to find ways to replace a cash cow the likes of which the publishing world has never seen before.

The UK’s Independent reports now that Bloomsbury will take the lead in developing a “literary version” of MySpace, a social networking site for book lovers. As Mashable points out, there are already several players in this space (and in social networking-ville, every space has players, and many are lousy with them), including GoodReads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing.

LibraryThing has been around for some time, and has a low budget yet functional and organic feel to it. Shelfari, which is backed by Amazon, has a higher gloss sheen and kind of feels like a Flickr of books, using large thumbnails of book jackets to help people identify their literary selves.

Speaking of Amazon, I think they’re the company who really has the biggest opportunity to claim this space. All the pieces are there: they have the audience and the site is packed to the rafters with social networking-style features such as recommended items, wish lists, friending, reviews (i.e. journaling or blogging), and so on.

I looked at a user profile on Amazon this morning and was surprised at how robust the feature set already is. I think the real challenge is to make this profile experience – the core of any social networking site – more prominent and relevant to Amazon visitors, who are mostly there to browse for books, DVDs, or other items.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports that the social networking sprawl is spilling over to the browser itself, with new Mozilla product The Coop bringing friending and media-sharing right into the Firefox browser. Next stop: the desktop.