Harry Potter Leaked Via Handheld Camera

owlgorithm writes "Salon reports that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked four days before it hits bookstores. It turns out that someone with access to the American edition of the book has taken a photograph of every one of the pages and made them available via bittorrent. Publishers may well be quaking in their boots, but in some places the quality is barely legible. On many pages the pirateer's hands are in the pictures with other pages needing a bit of Photoshopping just to make out the words. It appears many of the sites have been removing the content, naturally enough."

And will this decrease sales?

[lecithin]

I really doubt it. When this stuff happens the media reports it. that is advertising.

And for you folks that read this and/or the spoilers, too bad. You could have closed your eyes.

Re:and it won't cost them

[compro01]

actually, i wouldn't be entirely surprised if this is intentional. take pics, deliberately making most of them (all the really interesting/important parts) illegible, put it on every torrent site from here to Des Moines, and build a little(?) more hype for the big release at midnight on the 21st.

I went looking for spoilers

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost interest in Harry Potter after about the second book. The only thing that I was curious about was whether HP gets killed off. I'm sure not willing to plow through 759 pages to find that out. From that perspective, spoilers are a good thing.

It's not like I don't read; it's just that I prefer just about anything by Terry Pratchett to anything by JKR. They both have wizards but Pratchett's are way more entertaining because Pratchett is about three times as clever as JKR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett [wikipedia.org]

Re:Unexpectedly ruined?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, somebody MADE you read the spoilers?

When trolls post it in the middle of a batch of comments with a deceptive title? I didn't exactly seek out spoilers. It wasn't a Harry Potter related post even.

It's been leaked a lot easier than that.

[Anonymous Coward]

My copy showed up on the doorstep today. Online vendor, I won't say which one, but a medium-big name that you'd recognize. Pretty funny, I got the free "slow" shipping option. "Slow" turned out to be nearly a week before the release date...

Folks Just Don't Want an Old Yeller Ending

[gadlaw]

You know, folks are wanting to see or read the ending before they invest the time and energy into something when they might not like the ending. I don't watch 24, they always kill the folks I like. I found out how the Transformers movie went before going - didn't much like the cartoon movie where Optimus dies so I didn't particularly want to see that either. There are enough surprises out there and nobody wants to pay for a bad surprise so you know, the folks will noodle the facts out as soon as possible.

Serial numbers intact!

[jdberry]

I hear the perp left his Canon's serial number in the Exif data for each picture. I wonder if he registered the camera? Will Canon protect his privacy? ;)

Who cares?

[Mal-2]

The fans won't want to read this low-quality capture, the non-fans weren't buying anyway (except as a gift, which they'll still do), and besides, reading the book has never hurt the movie that follows from it. Having a crap copy is either going to do (1) nothing, as it's not worth the effort, or (2)make someone want the book.

Now if someone OCR'd it to a text file, THAT might actually cut into sales a little bit. But in order to do that, the capture would have to not suck.

This is like a .MOD file vs. an .MP3 -- the latter is sometimes a suitable replacement for the medium it came from, but the former is not. It may get the point across, but it's just not the same thing.

Mal-2

Re:The main problem...

[Khomar]

In fact, my husband and I have started avoiding trailers for much-anticipated movies, because even that spoils our enjoyment some.

An example of a good trailer was the original Matrix trailer. It showed a little bit of action and the Gothic look and ended with the enigmatic "Unfortunately, I can't tell you what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." Awesome. I will never forget the first time I saw the film in wonder at the things that Trinity was doing as she fled the cops or the shock of the interrogation scene with the "bug".

Pixar also usually does it right (at least before the final trailers... then, not so much). Introduce the characters and the basic feel... but what is the movie about? No idea, but I want to see it. Too bad more studios don't learn some lessons here.