Tor are not Orbit. Orbit are releasing the book across all Commonwealth territories and, although Tor will sell vastly more copies, Orbit theoretically have access to a bigger market. Orbit are sending a very few selected review copies to a few selected bloggers, although as far as I know apart from myself just about none of them are regular WoT fans and will be reviewing the book before release. I'm not sure if Ken or Pat fall into that category either (I imagine they'll be dealing with Tor). My review copy isn't expected until maybe a week before the street-date anyway, around the time the book will be hitting the shelves anyway.



I'm pretty sure it isn't a copyright violation at all. Issuing a book early happens all the time and is not a major problem unless it's a huge amount of time early (such as the month-early release of CoT in the UK in December 2002, which I know RJ was unhappy with). KoD was also on the shelves more than a week before the official release date (in the UK anyway), as was NEW SPRING. Unless you're JK Rowling or Dan Brown, enforcing street dates can be a really bad idea, if not handled correctly as Bantam UK recently discovered when they tried to enforce the DUST OF DREAMS release date with the net result bookshops refused to stock it until a week AFTER release as they couldn't have multiple 1,000-page hardcovers taking up their stock rooms and they missed out on the series possibly hitting (the lower reaches of) the bestseller lists for the first time.



I think you are blowing this out of proportion. I was here (well, on Wotmania) when KoD came out and was a lurker at the time CoT did and don't recall the issues you outline here. I remember a few lame jokes which were obviously people having a laugh, but I do not recall anyone attempting to carry out a deliberate campaign of misinformation. I do recall the point-by-point, 100% accurate spoiler review someone posted about two weeks before KoD came out.



As others have said, no-one has to read the thread. I remember people regretting reading the KoD thread at the time (including me, as I didn't realise it would be a blow-by-blow summary of the book), but that's up to them. And as has been said, it's a specifically spoiler free situation.