In June of 2003 I found myself
involved in a peculiar enterprise. I had been unemployed for around 2
weeks and, lacking savings, had found a diversion that cost nothing, allowed
me to read unlimited numbers of free books, and that part of me actually
believed in on a philosophical level.
I had stumbled into an online community devoted to (illegally) digitizing
books. I couldn’t help but be amazed. It was a social environment
without physical interaction. It was a warehouse without physical products.
It was a well organized and efficient company with no boss and no payroll.
It was a retail store where everything was free. I was captivated by their
belief in materials-free products and their earnest desire to overrule
and override the capitalism-at-any-cost culture. It wasn’t long
before I was one of them.
That June the impending release of the 766 page Harry Potter and the Order
of the Phoenix, was causing an upwelling in the community. Potter fans
were seeking out these online libraries of illicit material praying that
someone had attained a pre-release of Order of the Phoenix and made it
available online. The community, however, was not willing to take any
such risks. A pre-release of a book so gigantic would certainly mean criminal
investigations and lawsuits and probably the end of the community.
So we bided our time, planning and plotting the ripping of the phoenix.
The leaders of the community had recruited several folks in Britain (where
12:01 am arrives 5 hours before it does in New York) for source acquisition
and readied them for the release. On the day in question the acquisitions
team waited in late night lines of sometimes more than 2000 people to
purchase a copy and then ran or drove the books to their scanner who’s
job was to literally cut one fifth of the pages from the book and scan
them using OCR. An OCR (optical character recognition) scan is actually
able to read the letters of the book and output text instead of an image.
The advantage of OCR is that the files are orders of magnitude smaller.
The disadvantage is that OCR makes mistakes. And so each chapter, once
it was scanned, had to be edited by one of a network of individuals waiting
by their computer to be called into action.
I was one of these. At 1:15 EST (the rippers had now been at the books
for around 5 hours) a British scanner sent me an installment, Chapter
14, Percy and Padfoot. I spent the next 2 hours painstakingly checking
and correcting the OCR’s mistakes. After the chapter was formatted
and corrected it was sent (in HTML format) to the channel for distribution.
By three o’clock AM EST the first 15 chapters were already available
for download either through secure web pages or peer to peer sends. I
later found out that the first chapter was released moments before June
21st began on the east coast, presumably just to show that we were better
than Barnes and Noble’s, and could provide a product faster.
To this day, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix holds the record
time from book release to rip release, and I’m still amazed I was
a part of it.
It is true that those of us who worked this project accomplished a kind
of theft. A theft from J.K. Rowling, a woman whose work we respected and
appreciated. But we believed that theft was outweighed by the significance
of our actions. We responded to the demand for cost and materials free
publishing. But more importantly than that, through an organizational
feat, using dozens of late night volunteers we did something that had
never been done before. Right or wrong, the thrill of doing it kept us
going. That’s reason enough for any bored, unemployed, industrious,
young person. And that’s why they’ve got to keep their eye
on us.
For a full year I wrote a weekly column for a daily paper in Boulder CO. I wrote about being young, poor and green, and the column was widely loved throughout the city. It remains one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
If you've got some time on your hands...check 'em out.
Colder than the Hinges of Hell
Four More Ounces of Responsibility