Time will tell how big of an impact this makes but, for now, booksellers might want to be afraid. According to the Wall Street Journal: "Photographed pages allegedly from the highly anticipated final book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series were flooding Internet file-sharing services and other sites yesterday, including the photo-sharing service Flickr and the video site YouTube."
Scholastic (NYSE: SCHL) won't say whether any legitimate copies of the book have been found online, but did say several were fake. Allegedly pirated copies were also found on BitTorrent.
While this is unlikely to have a material impact on book sales for now, you have to wonder: Are the problems facing music companies related to piracy likely to spread into the publishing industry?
It seems likely that they could, eventually. It will take longer than music because music can be illegally downloaded without substantially changing the listening experience. That's not true for books right now, but will technological advances make it so?
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Tom Barlow: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Will Rowling kill off Harry?
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