18 July, 2007

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Leaked

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - 3 days to go
So it got leaked, only the second of the books to have done so (before release day), but what a waste of all that money spent on prevention - £20 million was it? The press is all abuzz...despite the fact that the copy released is pretty bad (someone turned every page and took a wobbly shot with a low-res point-and-shoot, believe it or not)...perhaps the culprit *could* be tracked down (by a dedicated investigator) with a combination of hand-matching, carpet matching (it's definitely an office carpet), and clues from the objects that appear around the periphery in many of the shots (something circular and gold in the top left hand corner, diet coke can, special brew can(?) and on the right perhaps the base of an office lamp, or the corner of a buff brown bag with a black trim)...But it's already a colossal best seller, before it even hits the shelves, so I don't suppose it's really worth the bother (apart from to save a few red faces at the top)...I mean, no one is going to seriously think about cancelling their purchase off the back of this leak...

Anyway, shortly after all the low-res photos appeared, some kind soul turned them all into a nice, single part PDF document, and within 48 hours, some other kind soul had translated the whole thing into German(!)...and I'm guessing it won't stop there either...The entire rationale for not to producing a digital version of this book was to stop precisely this kind of thing happening...didn't really work, did it...? And all this effort, all this free work these people have put in to getting this thing out there...especially the translators, it's quite staggering, remember - no-one is paying them to do this...

All I'm asking is, are there any lessons the publisher could learn here?

1 comment:

Matt Peskett said...

a few days off watching Murder She Wrote would teach them a thing or two ;-)