Harry Potter and the MMS of Electronic Distribution
by Ewan Spence
So what was the biggest message of last week? My money is on Harry Potter. And while I’m not going to talk about the plotlines here (much as I am tempted to bring up my theories on some of the romantic pairings), the voraciousness of fandom may well have pointed out one possible new angle on content distribution.
When we talk about Mobile Messaging, we are looking both in the short term, but also occasionally with our heads held high, and our “We Love Trelawney†tea cosies firmly in place. I’m looking at the sheer volume of information that was shipped out in ‘dead tree’ format to make the midnight openings special and I’m thinking there must be a better way.
While letters and faxes still hold a place in the legal world, but for general day to day communication in the Western World, they have been surpassed in many cases by email and attachments. Even now, Email is threatening to go the way of Albus Dumbledore and be replaced by the MySpace’s and Facebooks of the current Social World. Each copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighed in at close to 1 kilogram (the sixth book actually broke this weight barrier in the UK edition). All this to make sure that at one point in time, people could start queuing up to read the words of one person.
And now for the science bit.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, condenses into a plain text file of around 1.1megabytes. With work, modern text compression tools will bring this to 650 kilobytes. Split this up into a bundle of chapters and it’s well within the regular 100K size limit of an MMS – and with devices such as the Sony Ericsson able to handle up to 300K per MMS, we’re not far off, with current technology, being able to deliver an entire book in a single MMS. We could use Email or a Push-WAP solution to do this right now if there was a proven demand.
Yes there was a certain social ennui of gathering at the local bookstore dressed as wizards, but that’s a lot of paper, a lot of ink, a lot of fuel to manufacture them, to distribute them, and then to implement a system as robust as any digital DRM system to embargo them (and like any DRM system, one leak and suddenly everyone has a copy; a discussion for another time).
And while it might not be best placed for a book that sold more than most of the Hollywood Box Office on launch weekend, for the smaller author looking to get established and build up ties to fandom, the electronic, direct to handset method could be an important tool in the 21st Century. Al lthese books have electronic versions on the authors computer, with a few tools, 15 minutes conversion, and a switched on internet head, distribution becomes a one click process.
