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."

Comments

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.

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.

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