Harry Potter and the Download of Doom
Published July 15, 2003
Harry popping up on the Internet, especially in countries without official translation, may even help popularize e-books:
- So far, authors and publishers have mainly stood on the sidelines of the Internet file-swapping frenzy that has shaken the music industry and aroused fear among makers of motion pictures. But the publishing phenomenon around the young wizard appears to be forging a new chapter in the digital copyright wars: Harry Potter and the Internet pirates.
A growing number of Potter devotees around the world seem to be embracing the prospect of reading the voluminous new book (766 pages in the British edition; 870 in the American version) on the screen. And at least some of them are assisting in the cumbersome process of scanning, typing in or translating the book, which its author, J. K. Rowling, has not authorized for publication in any of the existing commercial e-book formats.
Last week, enthusiastic readers put unofficially translated portions of "Order of the Phoenix" on the Web in German and Czech, only to remove them after the publishers that own the rights in their respective countries threatened legal action.
English-language copies of the book - along with fan-written stories masquerading as the real thing - are available on all the major file-sharing networks in a variety of file formats.
....Some publishing industry officials say the electronic Potter piracy may be a perverse sign that the public is finally acquiring a taste for e-books.
"I used to joke in my speeches that e-books had not arrived because none of the pirate sites were dedicated to books," said Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, which began putting books whose copyrights had expired online 32 years ago and has made nearly 9,000 books freely available. "It is obvious that the infrastructure to make legal e-books is now so strongly entrenched that people feel empowered to make their own, even when the publishing industry refuses."
....Wayne Chang, an American college student and computer systems administrator who is in Tokyo for the summer, said it took him about three minutes to download "Phoenix" to his laptop computer after searching local bookstores in vain when the book came out.
- Harry Potter and the Download of Doom
- Published: July 15, 2003
- Type:
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Books: News, Sci/Tech: Internet
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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Comments on this articleComments
Thanks Michelle, great to have reporters throughout the globe!
You're welcome;-) I would have posted something about it, because this news about the German website is making rounds in the blogosphere, but until now I managed to avoid the HP topic, because I think there's too much hype about it. I've read the first volume and couldn't find a reason for people to freak out about it. So I keep quiet and just try to ignore it.
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I've also seen the German website which, interestingly, seems to be a long-time project. From what I gathererd there, this is not the first Harry Potter volume they translated. But this time, the media hype seems to be huge - in Germany and France the book was the first novel in English to ever be on top of the Bestseller lists. So the publishers must be quite anxious for their own translations. Anyway, the German publisher, Carlsen, didn't shut the project down, but asked the kids to shared the translations just between the translators. And if you read any of the translations (when they where still available) you could easily see that they were no threat to the official translations coming out. It was the work of teenage kids with all the gramatical and stylistic mistakes. So nothing you would really like to read.
Just my two cents;-)