Harry Potter 6 As An EBook

Oh dear. Grok this and giggle. No Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince Ebook? Think again. The book is due out on July 16th. Given my experience with the release of Harry Potter 5, the first chapter was avaialble in text format in all the usual places on the web within an hour or two of the release of the book. Subsequent chapters appeared within 30-45 minutes of the preceeding chapter. Right now there are teams of OCR’s, scanners, copy readers, hosts and web watchers all geared up for the biggest and fastest “dead tree to .txt” project to date. Mark my words, the novel will be fully transcribed and up on the web within 12 hours.

In all this, the most galling thing is the publishers must know this happens. JK Rowling acknowledges this even herself. Although quotes like “[downloaded ebooks] may infect your computer with viruses, leave you vulnerable to the dangers of hacking and/or credit card fraud and may also contain content that has nothing to do with Harry Potter, to say the least.” completely miss the point (and beauty) of plain vanilla text. If the publishers of HP6 said, fair enough, cutting out paper and production costs, there is £3.50 to pass out to us, the author and everyone else, so we’ll charge £3.50 for a text file of the book, then anyone can grab it, I’d be there in an instant. So would a lot of people.

1kg of book or 950K of text? No contest. And if they need living proof you can succeed then look no further than Cory “Look it works and the sky is not falling down” Doctorow.