Harry Potter Fans Transcribe Book from Photos
A group of Harry Potter fans are collectively typing out “Deathly Hallows”, the final episode in the Harry Potter series, from photographs leaked of each page in the book.
A torrent containing a text PDF file of the first ten chapters of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” has started to appear on torrent sites all over the web.
We first spotted it on mininova, when a reader tipped us off. It has also shown up on several other BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, whose admins have refused to take down any of the “Deathly Hallows” torrents, despite admirable efforts by J.K. Rowling’s publishers.
According to the reader, who chose to remain anonymous, the torrent contains a PDF of the first ten chapters and a text file with a message calling for assistance in transcribing the book from the photos:
We are looking for help in finishing the book. With enough people it goes quickly. Please contact harry7pottah@hush.com to get in contact with us. No skills beyond reading and writing are required and help would be greatly appreciated.
It seems rather ludicrous that this is happening mere days before the book’s release. Why bother typing out the entire book from photos when it will hit bookshops all over the world in less than a week? The only plausible reason seems to be a trait of rabid fanboyism only seen among Harry Potter readers and users of Apple’s Macintosh computers.
But it looks like some people aren’t even ready to believe the book has actually been leaked! MTV blogger Jennifer Vineyard claims that the book’s a fake:
First of all, there are multiple versions that contradict one another. One table of contents, for instance, calls chapter 10 “Kreacher’s Tale,” while another table of contents calls the same chapter “The Reflection in the Mirror.”
We will only know whether the leaked photographs are photoshopped or not when the book is released a few days from now, but for argument’s sake I’m going to point out that “The Reflection in the Mirror” is the 10th chapter in a fake fan fiction torrent of the book that has been floating around the Internet for days, if not weeks. In the leaked photographs, the 10th chapter is “Kreacher’s Tale”. It looks like the MTV guys have been downloading torrents. For research purposes, of course.
update: chapters 11-21 are transcribed.
update: all chapters are transcribed.
