It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind. He was waiting for a call from the President of a far distant country, and between wondering when the wretched man would telephone, and trying to suppress unpleasant memories of what had been a very long, tiring, and difficult week, there was not much space in his head for anything else.

That’s the opening of the 1st chapter of the latest Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. No, I haven’t bought this 6th Harry Potter’s book yet, instead, I got the pirated E-Book version. This e-book is first posted by someone on Chinesse’ bulletin board. The Chinesse pirate probably used OCR software to convert the book into digital format. Later, another person on IRC’s group also released the e-book version of this Harry Potter book, but with more accurate convertion than the Chinesse pirated version.

From LiewCF’s blog:

BEIJING (Hollywood Reporter) – Less than 24 hours after the English edition of the latest Harry Potter book went on sale in China’s capital on the weekend, the full text of the 672-page tome was available for free on the Internet as an unauthorized e-book, the Beijing News reported on Wednesday.

The Shui Mu Tsing Hua bulletin board service posted the full text of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” on Sunday, according to the Chinese language daily.

Those pirates offer several formats for the Harry Potteer and the Half-Blood Prince book. From txt, DOC, to PDF. Don’t forget, they also don’t charge anything for it. It’s totally free…

Will I buy this J.K Rowling’s book after I read the e-book? Yes, I will. Maybe not now because the price is still way too expensive for me. I’ll probably get the Indonesian version, since the other 5 Harry Potter’s books I owned are Indonesian translated version. Oh, and it’s also cheaper than the original versiom )

Updated (October 11th, 2005): You can download the eBook here.
Updated (December 13rd, 2005): eBook download link has been removed.