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I haven't read them, I'm not going to. However, for everyone who's saying that the fact that Scholastic hasn't subpoenaed anyone so they must not be legit - Scholastic has, according to Publisher's Lunch, subpoenaed an unauthorised poster.
I would assume that means they are legit. I am not a member of the Full Lunch, so I can't read the article, and I'm not about to Google for it because I really don't want to be spoiled - it might well be crap, but it'll be good to know that it's really the crap that I'm reading, accompanied with the cover and the actual book-ness of the whole thing - but if you wish to confirm that, you are free to Google yourselves. All I have to contribute is the fact that Scholastic subpoenaed someone about this; to my mind, this imputes legitimacy to the whole thing, because they would not subpoena someone who didn't actually do this.
It's possible, were it another company, that they would do all this as a joke in the event that they wanted people to think that this was really the book, but my take on it is that it would take a LOT of careful legal maneuvering, and I simply don't know if the cost and time of, basically, leaking a pretend version of a real book, would be worth it, particularly since it's not as though they have limited control over that book. There are millions of those books in print, sitting in stockrooms the world over, waiting for Friday night to be opened. Even if they were to try a marketing trick of releasing a fake book, the odds that the real one would also not be leaked are not high, so I'd assume they'd write that off as a possibility - too expensive for too little return. This is not If I Did It, where hiding the name of the book, the author of the book, and what the book was about, was the only thing that would sell the book to retailers. Scholastic, Bloomsbury, Warner Brothers, Rowling herself, and anyone else who makes a dime off Pottermania doesn't need to create buzz to get people to buy the book.
I would assume that means they are legit. I am not a member of the Full Lunch, so I can't read the article, and I'm not about to Google for it because I really don't want to be spoiled - it might well be crap, but it'll be good to know that it's really the crap that I'm reading, accompanied with the cover and the actual book-ness of the whole thing - but if you wish to confirm that, you are free to Google yourselves. All I have to contribute is the fact that Scholastic subpoenaed someone about this; to my mind, this imputes legitimacy to the whole thing, because they would not subpoena someone who didn't actually do this.
It's possible, were it another company, that they would do all this as a joke in the event that they wanted people to think that this was really the book, but my take on it is that it would take a LOT of careful legal maneuvering, and I simply don't know if the cost and time of, basically, leaking a pretend version of a real book, would be worth it, particularly since it's not as though they have limited control over that book. There are millions of those books in print, sitting in stockrooms the world over, waiting for Friday night to be opened. Even if they were to try a marketing trick of releasing a fake book, the odds that the real one would also not be leaked are not high, so I'd assume they'd write that off as a possibility - too expensive for too little return. This is not If I Did It, where hiding the name of the book, the author of the book, and what the book was about, was the only thing that would sell the book to retailers. Scholastic, Bloomsbury, Warner Brothers, Rowling herself, and anyone else who makes a dime off Pottermania doesn't need to create buzz to get people to buy the book.
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