Triumph of the nerds

Harry Potter's latest secret may have already slipped out in Vancouver but publishers of the best-selling books hope the magical allure of author J.K. Rowling's autograph will get it back under wraps.

Rowling's sixth novel about the young wizard is not scheduled to be released until Saturday, but a Vancouver grocery store accidentally sold 14 copies of the book last week.

[from CTV.ca]

Now, when I was in high school, my geeky friends and I shared our Isaac Asmiov paperbacks around, and we got tremendously excited when Douglas Adams published something new. We analyzed The Hobbit for fun.

But we were the honor-society kids. We were the brainiacs. We were the dorks. If you had told any of us that twenty years later, little kids and grownups and people we would have dismissed as "mundanes" would be lining up to buy a fantasy novel... that law enforcement and civil courts would have to step in to maintain order while folks were waiting for this book’s release... Well, we would have laughed, and we would have considered that fantasy. And yet:

Raincoast Books, along with Bloomsbury Publishing PLC of Britain and author J.K. Rowling, were granted a so-called "John and Jane Dow'' injunction last Saturday in B.C. Supreme Court.

The injunction restrains anyone who has directly or indirectly received a copy or any other form of disclosure of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from disclosing all or any information from the book before 12:01 a.m. on Saturday July 16.

[also from CTV.ca]

We are all dorks now.

Sure, I shall be spending a good chunk of this weekend devouring Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. But I would have been doing that anyway. That so many other ostensibly normal people will be doing the same thing is extraordinary.