Frustrating perhaps the most elaborately orchestrated marketing machine ever mobilized for a book, photographs of what appeared to be every single page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the series by J. K. Rowling, were circulating on the Web yesterday.
To the publishers of Harry Potter, there is no time or date more sacred than what they are calling “midnight magic,” 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. Then, and only then, can readers buy their copies of “Deathly Hallows.” Both Bloomsbury, the British publisher, and Scholastic, the publisher in the United States, have gone to great lengths to safeguard the book’s content and release date, ordering booksellers not to sell a single book a minute earlier than the official time.
But those less mindful of the publishers’ wishes could go onto various file-sharing Web sites yesterday to look at amateur-seeming photographs of what appeared to be each pair of facing pages of a copy of the book. The pictures, which could be downloaded through sites like the Pirate Bay and MediaFire, showed the book laid out on a green-and-red-flecked beige looped carpet, with fingers holding the pages open. Some of the photos made the text difficult to read, but the fiercely protected ending was definitely legible.
Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division, said the company was asking various Web site hosts to take the photos down. “We’re not confirming if anything is real,” she said. “But in the spirit of getting to midnight magic without a lot of hoo-ha, can you just take some of this stuff down.”
The company’s lawyers were also pursuing the identity of the person who posted the pictures.
On Monday, the company issued a subpoena to Gaia Online, a social networking and gaming site, ordering it to take down a link to some photos purporting to be “Deathly Hallows” pages posted by a user. Bill Danon, a Gaia spokesman, said that within hours of the subpoena, Gaia removed the photos and banned the user for 14 days.
Some fans were convinced that the images posted around the Web were authentic. Emerson Spartz, the founder and Web master of MuggleNet.com, one of the biggest Harry Potter fan sites, said he thought the photos were the real deal.
“I read enough of it to where I could tell,” he said. Although he did not read to the end, he said: “I’m not even really hopeful that it won’t get spoiled for me. I’m just expecting it anytime I log on to check e-mail.”
Doris Herrmann, an English teacher in Clear Lake, Tex., who is also a project coordinator for the Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), another big fan site, said: “I hate to say it, but it really does look authentic.” She said that while it was possible to work wonders with Photoshop or other programs, it would be difficult to write a whole manuscript, typeset it like the originals and then photograph the whole thing.
Tens of thousands of people downloaded the files yesterday, according to BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks file-sharing. By midday, many of the Web links were no longer working.
On the link-sharing site Digg yesterday, a person using the name TocsinFilms appeared to take credit for uploading the images, then said he was simply “one of the first” to do so. He wrote on Digg in May that he had obtained a copy of the book from “someone who works for a Scholastic Distributing company for Waldenbooks” and had posted photos of its pages online. Those photos have since been taken down. This person did not respond to e-mail or telephone inquiries.
Some who say they have copies of the book or knowledge of the plot have been posting snippets and scans of supposed manuscript pages for weeks. Ms. Holton acknowledged that some of the photos looked genuine. But, she added, “it’s a bunch of people who are going to extraordinary lengths to make it look like they have the authentic book.”
There were also six photos posted on Flickr, the picture-sharing site, by a user named hermionepotter77, a reference to one of Harry’s best friends. Over the caption “Here ya go kids, the Deathly Hallows ending!” one appeared to show the first page of the final chapter; others showed the table of contents and more pages. This material was almost entirely different from what appeared in the images of the full book, meaning one or both had to be fake.
“This happens with every book, and there are a lot of them out there, and we appeal to everybody not to put them up,” said Sarah Beal, a spokeswoman for Bloomsbury in London. “It’s amazing how creative people can be. It may look real, but it doesn’t mean they are.”
Hype and frenzy have been building for weeks as readers anticipate the release of this final Harry Potter book. Ms. Rowling has hinted that two or more characters are likely to die, leading to speculation from many fans that Harry may not survive his own series. Fans have been hypothesizing about other important plot points, too, like who will end up with whom and whether Prof. Severus Snape, a character whose moral character has been in question, is genuinely evil.
Despite the possible leak, bookstores across the country continued to gear up for festivities on Friday night, expecting long lines of readers at midnight. Scholastic is publishing a record 12 million copies, and Ms. Holton said the company had no plans to move up the release date.
“If in fact the book is posted online or the ending is revealed prior to midnight on Friday, it will not result in us selling a single less copy of the book,” said Steve Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, which has 1.3 million orders for “Deathly Hallows.” As far as Mr. Riggio is concerned, the press coverage generated by potential spoilers just increases advance orders.
Judy Bulow, children’s book buyer for the three Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, said she doubted that Web spoilers would deter readers from buying the book or attending the midnight parties.
“I think kids are still wanting the great big book,” she said. Tattered Cover is planning parties at two locations and will raffle off the chance to be first in line to buy a copy.
