Since the launch of the NewsQuake blog earlier this year, we've featured quite a few interviews, with personalities as diverse as Geoff Emerick, Michael Musto, William Langewiesche, Rob van Hattum, and Carlo Bonini. In all these cases, we've welcomed comments from visitors. However, this top-down approach didn't feel quite right for a social news site. To a great degree, it still left the community on the margins, which contradicts the fundamental fact about any social news site: the community belongs in the center ring.

So we're going to try a different approach. Below you will find the subjects of three impending interviews here at Propeller. What we're asking is for community members to submit questions in advance. We can't promise that all questions will be included in the final product--there may be duplicates, or questions that simply don't fit into the conversation. We will also experiment with different ways of integrating these questions: they may be threaded into the interview proper, or grouped at the end as a kind of lightning round. But we hope as many members as possible will join the party. We'll probably set up a mail queue for this express purpose, but for now, please do send those questions to James Marcus via Propeller site mail. Here are the subjects, folks, along with some relevant information about each one:

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Francis Ford Coppola is the writer and director of such classic films as The Conversation (1974), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). His new film, Youth Without Youth, is based on a novella by the Romanian philosopher and religious scholar Mircea Eliade, and will open in the U.S. in December.

ALEX ROSS
Alex Ross writes about classical music for The New Yorker (and occasionally contributes profiles of such hard-to-pigeonhole performers as Björk). He is the author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was just chosen by The New York Times as one of The Ten Best Books of 2007. Ross blogs about his many musical interests at The Rest Is Noise.com.

GARRETT M. GRAFF
Garrett M. Graff is the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com, and was the first blogger ever to cover a White House press briefing. While still a teenager, he worked on Howard Dean's campaign, serving as the candidate's first webmaster. He is currently an editor-at-large at Washingtonian magazine, and is about to publish The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. You can learn more about him here, and check out his personal blog here.

To nobody's surprise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has broken all sorts of records, notching preorders in the millions. With just five days before publication, however, there may now be a fly in the wizardly ointment. According to reports like this one, from Canada's National Post, at least some portions of the book may have been leaked online:


The Vancouverite mentioned above, Byron Ng, claims to have found 495 pages of the book on a peer-to-peer network. "It is not an e-book or Word file, which is what people would normally do," Ng told National Post reporter Kevin Griffin. "What some guy did was take pictures of it, 500 little files, each with a picture of a page. Someone took the trouble to do that." A representative of Raincoast Books, which publishes the Potter series in Canada, declined to verify the authenticity of the text.

But meanwhile, the plot thickens: it appears that there may be more than one alleged version of Deathly Hallows floating around the Internet. Back in June, a hacker claimed to have stolen a copy of the manuscript from Bloomsbury, the book's British publisher. The hacker, "Gabriel," posted a number of plot spoilers, which caused a spike in traffic over at Insecure.org (a security and hacking site that archived his initial post on a mailing list.) This may or may not be the version Ng encountered.

And what of Scholastic, which publishes the series in the United States? In response to a telephone query, NewsQuake received a one-size-fits-all email statement from the company's Vice President for Corporate Communications, Kyle Good. "There is a lot of material on the Internet that claims to come from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," he writes, "but anyone can post anything on the Internet and you can't believe everything you see online. We all have our theories on how the series will end, but the only way we'll know for sure is to read the book ourselves at 12:01 a.m. on July 21st. No matter what anyone claims before that time, we know that parents, booksellers, librarians and especially fans do not want spoilers but rather want to keep the magic alive for that midnight moment when everyone can read the book together."

That said, Scholastic has taken steps to put out yet another piracy-related fire. According to this story in the Los Angeles Times, the company has "obtained a subpoena to learn the identity of a user who allegedly posted copies of the final sequel, scheduled for release Saturday, on a California website." The offending material was posted on Photobucket.com, a file-sharing service owned by Fox Interactive. Scholastic has sought not only the removal of the leaked material (which did, according to the subpoena, amount to copyright infringement) but the identity of the poster.

To complicate matters further, NewsQuake has obtained yet another purported Potter manuscript. The 659-page PDF is clearly not the same one stumbled across by Ng--it's a typescript, with none of the blurry images described in the National Post article. And unless J.K. Rowling has seriously gone off her game, this one is clearly a fake. The prose is inept, and on the penultimate page, a randy Harry seems to be giving Ron Weasley some erotic tips:


If that's authentic, I'll eat my sorting hat. It's a tribute to the power of Rowling's series, of course, that such fan-generated sequels have become a minor, black-market industry. But unless Ng's find turns out to be the real thing, Potter fans will have to wait for the legitimate release on Saturday.

Outside the Jacob Javits Convention Center, it was another scorching day in Manhattan. Inside, where an estimated 36,000 editors, booksellers, authors, journalists, and publicists would be commingling throughout the weekend, it was more tolerable--like a mild afternoon in the tropics. Welcome to Book Expo America, the publishing industry's annual romp, where the written word (along with an ocean of ancillary products) is the most desirable commodity on earth.


I spent three days roving the cavernous aisles, harvesting galleys, trinkets, pencils, tote bags, and at least one glass of champagne. I dodged in and out of panels, and when I could, I collared various industry bigwigs for a few moments of diagnostic chat. The first of these was Steve Wasserman, who's worn a good many hats during a long career in the trade: he ran both Hill & Wang and Times Books, then became editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and is now a literary agent. What, I asked him, was the state of the industry? And where was the good news?