Will that kill the buzz? Maybe not. Taking its own informal poll, NEWSWEEK chatted today with more than 100 fans who had downloaded “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” All but three said they still intend to purchase the hardcover edition, many of them the moment it goes on sale. “I downloaded it from MediaShare—and I’m going to be standing in line at the midnight [book sale] party in full Auror [elite wizard] drag,” says a fan who identified himself as an 18-year-old from Quincy, Ill.
“I don’t think it’s going affect sales one bit. The kids have been with this series for 10 years and they’re going to want to finish it,” says Kim Brown, vice president of merchandise for Barnes & Noble. “They’re going to want the book.”
The online leaks are chaotic, as multiple versions proliferate—some real, some fake—and Scholastic attempts to get webmasters to remove data from their servers. NEWSWEEK was halfway through a download of the first 495 pages when the transmission was abruptly halted—yanked, it would seem, by an administrator in the nick of time. But there is no shortage of copies on the Web. The original leak consisted of digital photos of each page, shot from above; by Wednesday, an army of typists had converted the first 10 chapters of those blurry images into a much more legible PDF. They’re still at work transcribing the rest. Some readers insist the work they’d downloaded was a forgery. (Among the files available for download is a 285,000-word, 34-chapter tome that seems convincing at first—but eventually reveals itself to be fan fiction, sometime around a rather adult scene between Harry and Ginny. Parents beware.)
Ruth, a 26-year-old history student at the University of Hamburg, had no trouble locating the leaked text. “I Googled two or three words, like ‘Harry Potter leak,’ and it came up! It took me like four minutes,” she said from Berlin. “At first I read the comments because I wanted to make sure it was the legitimate version. There have been spoilers online for months, and most of the time they turn out to be false.” This time, she was convinced she had the real thing by the end of the first eight pages, when she found some lovely details on Dumbledore’s youth that only J.K. Rowling could have included, she said.
Not all the leaks were digital. Scholastic announced Wednesday that it would pursue legal action against Levy Home Entertainment, a distributor, and DeepDiscount.com, one of its customers, for their early shipment of an unspecified number of books to customers as early as Tuesday. Andrew Moscrip, a vice president for Infinity Resources, DeepDiscount.com’s parent company, told NEWSWEEK he was not aware any copies had been shipped ahead of embargo, or of any legal action on the part of Scholastic. “We take it very seriously and we’ll be conducting an investigation,” he said. Another employee of the Web site told the Baltimore Sun that they had mistakenly relied on UPS delivery estimates to get the books to customers at the appropriate time.
Harry Potter being Harry Potter, such mania over the release of a book is probably unique. But broken embargoes are becoming a pattern across the industry, says Martha Levin, publisher of the Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster. “It’s virtually impossible for any publisher to execute an embargo,” she said. “I haven’t had a successful one in a year.”
“I’m sure in the months to come there will be conversations about implications for the future—what new, incredibly stringent things are we going to have to do,” Levin says. “But what can you do? Clearly not much, because if Bloomsbury and Scholastic couldn’t keep this locked down, I just don’t know.”
