Note: this post is spoiler-free.
Security guru Bruce Schneier writes:
It’s online [Note: link is spoiler safe]: digital photographs of every page are available on BitTorrent.
I’ve been fielding press calls on this, mostly from reporters asking me what the publisher could have done differently. Honestly, I don’t think it was possible to keep the book under wraps. There are millions of copies of the book headed to all four corners of the globe. There are simply too many people who must be trusted in order for the security to hold. And all it takes is one untrustworthy person — one truck driver, one bookstore owner, one warehouse worker — to leak the book.
But conversely, I don’t think the publishers should care. Anyone fan-crazed enough to read digital photographs of the pages a few days before the real copy comes out is also someone who is going to buy a real copy. And anyone who will read the digital photographs instead of the real book would have borrowed a copy from a friend. My guess is that the publishers will lose zero sales, and that the pre-release will simply increase the press frenzy.
I’m kind of amazed the book hadn’t leaked sooner.
Paper-based media also has its share of spoilers and early releases:
With only two days to go before the publication of the seventh and final instalment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun have broken one of the most stringent embargoes of recent times and published a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
After reading a copy “purchased at a New York City store yesterday”, one of America’s most influential literary critics, Michiko Kakutani, hails the volume in the New York Times as a dose of “good old-fashioned closure”.
Bloomsbury described the review as “very sad” to Reuters, pointing out that there was only one more day until the official release of the book around the world.
Link to Guardian article (some very vague spoilers, mostly about book structure/pacing)
Published today in The Guardian:
