Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The New York Times, along with a few other places, is reporting that the new, and last, Harry Potter novel is already beginning to surface on the Web. Writes Motoko Rich in yesterday’s Times, “Photos of what appeared to be every page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the wildly popular series by J.K. Rowling, were circulating around the Web today, potentially upsetting the most elaborate marketing machine ever mobilized for a book.” And this is just the beginning; right now you have lo-fi photographs of pages on Photobucket. By Sunday the entire text will be online thanks to the efforts of a very motivated group of readers who want to read and share the book electronically and, because there’s no official eBooks version, they have to create their own. (The same way they’ve done in the past with the other books.)

True, this is one of the most anticipated books of all time, but you don’t see people going out and recording their own audio editions, or trying to steal the typesetting files and pressing their own books. That’s because the Potter book will indeed be made available via print and audio. 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. She does all of this because she’s a fervent lover of books, but these days it’s getting impossible to be a lover of books but be against piracy, since this is all about the “attention economy.” Because if people want to read this book electronically, they’re going to do so; the only thing Rowling is doing by restricting access to eBooks — in what I feel is a misguided paean to Gutenberg — is making sure that all digital reading of her book will be done illegally. Crime may be a disease, but in this instance an official, Scholastic-sanctioned eBook would be the cure.