J.K. Rowling, best-seller author of the Harry Potter series, may be brilliant at her fiction, but she’s a dunce about the Net. Details from the Wall Street Journal:
Digital audiobooks that listeners can download from the Internet onto their iPods and other MP3 players have become one of the hottest areas in publishing thanks to their convenience and ease of use.
But the novel that would undoubtedly be the biggest digital audiobook seller of all time, J.K. Rowling’s coming “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” likely won’t be available for downloading. To date, Ms. Rowling hasn’t made a deal for the book to be published in a downloadable format, and none of the previous Harry Potter books are available that way, either.
In fact, Ms. Rowling has been burned by unauthorized digital publication of her five earlier novels. “You should NEVER trust any Harry Potter e-books offered for download from the Internet or on P2P/file-trading networks,” she wrote in January on her Web site, www.jkrowling.com. She urged readers not to fall for these “scams.” She ended her warning with a quote from Mad Eye Moody, one of her characters: “Constant vigilance!”
Problem is that some of her fans will download illegal Potter texts and probably audios because she hasn’t made legal versions avilable online. Gasp, you can even pirate Harry Potter by OCRing and uploading paper editions on the Net, and digitized versions of audio CDs almost surely are or will be available online as well.
Note: Speaking of restictions, this Wall Street Journal article may be available only to paid subscribers.
Related: NYT article: audio books gaining acceptance. (Via MobileRead.)
There was another paper from Pittsburgh I believe that carried this article as well.
I find it ludicrous. Someone needs to educate the author about the technology because she doesn’t seem to understand it. She also says in that article that she won’t allow downloadable audio books of her works over the internet. However, if you buy the CD audio book available everywhere, you could easily convert it to MP3 and pass it all over. She won’t, however, allow for the book to be purchasable via a legal downloadable format like Audible.com’s. That format is much more secure than an Audio CD, and yet paranoia has blinded her to anything Internet . Just another example of how fear is causing people to sabotage their own product…
All great points. Thanks for writing in.