Elonka wrote:

Pirated copies of the new Harry Potter book have hit the streets of Mumbai (Bombay) barely two days since its worldwide release.
 . . .
In its first 24 hours, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold 6.9m copies in the US and more than two million in the UK, beating all previous Potter records.

Because of the sheer size of the novel, I'm intrigued to learn more about how the bootleggers produced copies so quickly. Did they get their hands on an electronic version? Was it a simple case of OCR? Or a team of really fast typists? "You do chapter 1, I'll do chapter 2, she'll do chapter 3...". Cheap labor is easy to come by in Bombay, and fluency with English is common, so my guess is the latter. There's probably even a 'factory' for bootlegged books, copying and reproducing -- so it may have been unwise for them to choose something this high profile. ;)

If anyone learns more about the process of the India "booklegging," please let me know?

I don't think the text needed to be translated as Penguin India has a version available. It could have been a flat out raw scan. Some copiers and presses can now produce books with covers very fast and very cheap and on demand. Something like this sort of set-up would do the trick nicely.

This & This are more specific.

RE: Pirated Harry Potters hit Mumbai