[Note: this post contains no spoilers, as I know nothing. I make no promises for the Potter-related links; some of them certainly contain spoilers or link to pages that contain spoilers. -SL]

I am what you’d call a casual Harry Potter fan. I have read all of the books– with the exception of Deathly Hallows–some more than once. I enjoyed them all, and I’ll read the new one some time in the next few months. I have seen bits and pieces of the movies on TV. I own no Potter paraphernalia or costume pieces.

But I do find the culture around these books interesting, especially the mania for spoilers and pirated copies that has surrounded the publication of the last few volumes in the series

Some blog posts this week–Jessamyn West’s Previews and spoilers in a 2.0 age and its subsequent update, where she noted that she had linked to apparently bogus Potter spoilers, and that there are multiple pirated electronic editions which themselves my be compromised with bogus information inserted via image manipulation techniques; plus Boing Boing’s take and the obligatory MetaFilter thread–had me thinking about book piracy, 18th-century-style.

I’m not an expert on the subject, but I think of Robert Darnton‘s paper, “The Science of Piracy” (available as an MS Word document). This is a paper that the distinguished historian of the book presented at the Center for the Study of Books and Media December 2004 Conference.

Right at the outset of his address, Darnton makes it clear how much piracy was going on in 18th century France (pp 2-3):

I would go so far as to argue that by 1770 most of the current literature available in France–aside from chapbooks, devotional tracts, and professional manuals–came from the pirate publishers outside the kingdom as well as from some who operated clandestinely within it.

So far that sounds more like the present-day music industry than the book publishing industry. Today, I don’t think I’d be going too far out on a limb in guessing that most of the music files on people’s computers are unauthorized copies.

On page 9, Darton talks about those pirates who, like Potter’s pirates, could beat the official publication date:

More important, the pirates were so quick off the mark, thanks to secret informers and proofs filched by workers in their pay, that they sometimes beat the original publisher to the market, and they were likely to damage his profits long before he could sell off his first edition. They easily undercut him, because they paid nothing for the manuscript and used relatively cheap paper. Sometimes they followed the original closely, producing true contrefaçons or counterfeit copies. More often they aimed their product at a broader public by eliminating illustrations, abridging the text, and purging the edition of everything that smacked of “typographical luxury.” If they went far enough down market, they might not harm the original edition at all.

Is photographing each opening of the book with a Canon Rebel 350 sufficiently “down market?” Certainly these pirate editions will have zero effect on sales in the US and UK.

But Darnton is clear that the pirates’ main motivation was sales and profit, exchanging many letters in their “market research” to determine exactly which books should be pirated and sold in which locations: “With adequate information and good enough timing, the pirates could make a killing”(9).

What is the motivation for piracy now? Surely no one is making a dime on all those torrents on Pirate Bay. I suppose it is natural human curiosity combined with natural human competitiveness to be first, and natural human cussedness to not let anyone tell them that they can’t do such a thing.

It seems that Rowling and her publishers are generally unamused by the piracy, or at least that is the line they have to take publicly. Darnton tells us that Voltaire had to talk a bit of a good game to his publisher, too, even as he passed along his proofs to the pirates himself. From page 11:

Voltaire was happy to oblige, because by then he no longer cared about making money from his pen. After more than fifty years of experience with publishers, he knew every trick in their trade; and he also had learned to put the tricks to use for a higher cause: the diffusion of Enlightenment, the campaign to écraser l’infâme. He therefore agreed to supply Ostervald with a copy of Cramer’s proofs, corrected and expanded, provided that everything took place behind Cramer’s back. Voltaire was happy, that is, to pirate himself. It was a way to multiply copies. Besides, he knew that the Questions would be pirated anyway–strange as it sounds to apply such a term to an illegal book. By cooperating with the STN, he could control that process, while touching up the text with additional audacities that he also could disavow.

So Voltaire could be even more outrageous in the pirated version of his already illegal book. That’s not analogous with Rowling’s situation of course. But commenters in the MetaFilter wonder if some of the apparently bogus torrents were actually seeded by the publisher to sow confusion about the actual text.

I wonder how easy it will be to find these pirated Potters a few years from now. Darnton can do his work on Enlightenment publishing practices because he was able to read a huge archive of correspondence of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, along with the end products–the pirated and official books themselves–in libraries. Who will have all this Potter stuff for another Darnton in 250 years? Will it be a library like the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, or more like the Internet Archive, or an individual enthusiast / private historian’s site like Jason Scott’s textfiles.com? Does it matter?