Like the hacker story last month, we’ll see if this story pans out, but CanWest News Service reports that Byron Ng, a 33-year-old based in Vancouver, has downloaded what appears to be about 60 per cent of the seventh and final Harry Potter book — even though the children’s novel isn’t supposed to be officially released until midnight Saturday.
Ng said he went online and found what appeared to be the novel’s first few paragraphs mentioned in an article that appeared Sunday in The Guardian, based in the U.K. He used that information to Google and find the rest of the novel. He found that someone had posted what appeared to be first 495 pages of the 794-page book on a peer-to-peer sharing website where directions to pirated movies and other material are located. So he downloaded it too. “It is not an E-book or Word file, which is what people would normally do,” he said. “What some guy did was take pictures of it, 500 little files, each with a picture of a page. Someone took the trouble to do that.”
Raincoast spokesperson Jamie Broadhurst demurred when reached for comment by CanWest, but of course he would – and if a huge chunk of DEATHLY HALLOWS is available online through a torrent website, most likely, (or through a photo-sharing site, which prompted Scholastic to come calling) then it would make sense that the document’s only been downloaded about 507 times. Still, without anything excerpted, it’s impossible to give the story full credence….