Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
Well, those I don't trust being the real ones  |
They were; a handful of stores had accidentally sold a few copies a few days before the release date. It's also possible that some bookstore employee grabbed one to copy.
The one that hit the web strongly wasn't OCRd at all--it was jpg photographs of someone holding the book open; the pages were almost unreadable, and the person's fingers could be seen holding the pages. That made it very unlikely to be a forgery.
Any pre-release text version would've been ignored as a probable fake. (There was a fanfic that was set in Harry's 7th year that was being passed around as the final book, but people who keep up with fanfic could either identify the story, or recognize the fanfic tropes that made it unlikely to be real.)