Friday, July 20, 2007

Skulduggery Central

The hackers post spoilers ... that's bad enough ... but a New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani review of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows ahead of time?

Lindesay Irvine invites readers to have their say on the Guardian blog.

Rowling is staggered.

I'd call it downright kiasu.

Postscript:

Also horribly kiasu in my opinion, is Tesco which, though it doesn't normally sell books in Malaysia, is undercutting all the bookshops by selling the book at just RM69.90. Will the store make any profit at all? Tesco stores in the UK are apparently making just a few pence a copy and presumably the idea is to tempt you to do the rest of your shopping there at the same time.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

are the papers really legally obliged to respect the embargo?

Chet said...

Rowling said: “I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry's final destination by themselves, in their own time.”

Somehow, I don't think children are the target audience of American newspapers.

bibliobibuli said...

the book is aimed at adults too, chet. there are even 2 covers.

Anonymous said...

Now if you could kill off half a dozen fictional characters (not necessarily HP), who would they be?

MM, I suspect her legal control was over the distributors, who were not allowed to release to anyone, including the press.

eyeris said...

Even though I've always complained about Happy Potty, I'm still gonna read (READ not BUY it), and I'm really annoyed at the whole TESCOCAREFOURE crap and all those MORONS posting spoilers on PPS And everywhere else.

ahem. more on my blog. sekian terima kasih.

Anonymous said...

I still don't understand the mania around Harry Potter ... having stopped reading it at book 2 ... never caught on with me. ;) I'm just glad they're not doing it to Robin Hobb's books!

qaminante said...

Nothing to do with the book (it never ceases to amaze me what newspapers think is news) but I recently read that this same Michiko Kakutani thinks "Received Pronunciation" (RP), a specific British English accent, is "the sound of the King James Bible and the classic novel"; which I still can't quite grasp, especially as her example of a classic novel is "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" - full of characters speaking with a West Country accent! I can only imagine she listens to audiobooks read by RADA-trained actors, and even then, they tend to use Scottish accents for Scottish books/characters, etc.. This was from Language Log, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004730.html#more