By David A. Bell Along with all the records to be set by the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Saturday is one that the authors and publishers are not going to be happy about. Already, even before publication, it is certainly the most widely-pirated e-book of all time. To judge by the ease with which I found and downloaded a copy yesterday, there must by hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation, or more, even as the publishers are making extraordinary efforts to prevent copies of the paper book from getting into readers' hands before the official release (for the record, I've already ordered a paper copy). Book publishers have not yet had to deal with piracy on the scale experienced by the music and movie industries. The basic reason is that the mechanics are more difficult. To produce a pirated book file, you need either to break the security coding on an existing electronic copy, or to go through the painful process of photographing or scanning each page. But at the same time, the files produced are much smaller, and so much easier to distribute, than the massive ones required for videos. And as I wrote in TNR a couple of years ago, in an article on the future of electronic publishing: "only one person has to take the trouble, and within hours millions of copies can be circulating on the Internet." With Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, that is exactly what has happened. Furthermore, with the advent of usable, commercially-viable e-ink "electronic readers" like the Sony Reader and the Irex Iliad, and even more impressive such devices coming down the road, the publishers are not going to be able to ignore the issue for much longer. In fact, publishers are already moving in the right direction. Just as the music industry has successfully moved to a reasonable electronic distribution model with iTunes and the like, and just as the movie industry is making more hesitant steps in the same direction, so most major book publishers are now encouraging iTunes-like models of their own. I have happily been downloading books from Mobipocket and reading them on my iLiad for several months now. But the most successful recent author of all is still resisting this trend: J.K.Rowling.