The New York Times reports that the latest Harry Potter book has been pirated, with teams of scanners and proofreaders from around the world translating the text to digital format--and sometimes translating to other languages also, well before the official translations were due.Book piracy (the digital variety, that is) is not, as the article occasionally suggests, a brand new thing. But it is true that the technology for pirating books has taken longer to catch up than the technology for pirating music, and even movies. What is unusual about book piracy is that, even with more advanced technology, it generally takes a lot more effort to digitize a book than to digitize a CD or a movie: not only must somebody actually sit down and scan hundreds of pages, but then somebody else must comb through the resulting file and proofread to remove all the errors that even the most advanced technology can’t prevent. These efforts become even more impressive when readers not only digitize a book from another language, but also translate it. It sometimes makes you wonder why translations take so long when a group of volunteers, working for free, can churn out something in a matter of days.
Read the article here.