The Potter Leak Continued
The Harry Potter mania still dumbfounds me (simply because they aren’t very good books by adult standards), but I like BoingBoing’s take on it:
Seriously, though. With the last book, the publisher was so freaked out about ebook “piracy” that they refused to release an official electronic edition. The result? Fans made their own electronic text in 24 hours. And other fans translated the book into German in 45 hours.
That’a a lot of fan-energy, sitting out there, looking for ways to love these books. Surely there’s a smarter way to deal with that kind of love than attempting to suppress it?
If you consider that there are Harry Potter fans out there willing to personally write complete novels about their characters, you just have to know that this same energy is going to go into discovering your secrets.
On the other hand, it’s the secrets that drive the hype. Apple does it brilliantly, and Scholastic did the same with this book.
In the end, it’s a viscous cycle.
Print is Dead thinks a lot of this is driven by the fact that there is no e-book version:
But because of Rowling’s obstinate refusal to have any of the Potter books produced digitally, she’s practically egging on hackers and would-be pirates, daring them to make eBooks out of her pBooks.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the availability or not of an e-book version. People aren’t really looking for that. There just aren’t a lot of people out there who want to read a novel on a screen. In the end, this whole affair is only going to drive up the hype. It won’t hurt the publisher one bit.
And lets face it – part of being a fan means living with anticipation, whether it be the beginning of a game, or the release data of a book.
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