Yesterday on Twitter someone stated that just fourteen minutes after the eBook went on sale, a pirate copy of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown was available.
Today I speculated that if that was the case, it was most likely the ePub that had been cracked.
Yep. And this post is proof.
It took me less than five minutes to find it and have a copy:
I opened it in FBReader in order not to clog up Adobe Digital Editions or Sony eBook Library:
Click = big
Click = big
Click = big
Click = big
And that’s as far as I went. I have no interest in reading the book and definitely no interest in possessing an illegal copy for longer than it took to create these screensnaps for this post.
So it was off to the Recycle Bin for it:
Wave bye-bye!
Click = big
And it’s gone from my hard drive.
There are deluded rubes out there claiming the Kindle eBook has outsold the print edition. Grow a brain!
I’d hardly be surprised, however, to learn that the pirated ePub edition has more circulation and readers than the printed edition.
And no, don’t bother to ask the where and hows of this. I won’t say.
The eBook Test 
Interesting. As a comparison: would it be as easy to find an illegal download of the Kennedy bio, which was not offered as an ebook? I know the audience for the two books is probably very different, but still.
I don’t know. I don’t go trawling for pirate eBooks as a general rule. I looked for this one to see if the piracy claim was true.
[…] Lost Symbol has also been pirated (15 minutes after release to be exact) and Mike Cane points outthat it is the ePub version that has been pirated. Makes me wonder – if a Kindle Edition were […]
As I commented somewhere else, I don’t know how the Kindle edition is selling but the PDF @ [torrent site that shall remain nameless]is flying off the virtual shelves. I don’t know what the original format was but it might have been .AZW, there is a utility that will strip the DRM from Kindle eBooks. The book may well have been a Kindle file that was stripped and converted to ePub using Calibre.
>>>The book may well have been a Kindle file that was stripped and converted to ePub using Calibre.
I doubt that. People on Twitter who had legitimate copies of the ePub were complaining about the crap formatting in evidence above: indented paras with spaces after the para.
I don’t think there are copies of the Kennedy biography available without DRM. It’s hard to predict what will make a book available without DRM.
Not that I’m justifying piracy, but the publishing industry is facing, in slow motion, the same problem the music industry had with Napster. The music industry solved the Napster problem by offering digital music in innovative new ways, at a price even pirates could live with. So far, the publishing industry is not letting the old model go (who can blame them?).
‘The book may well have been a Kindle file that was stripped and converted to ePub using Calibre.’
Probably not, because of the non-US cover, and the fact the Kindle isn’t available for sale outside the US.
‘I’d hardly be surprised, however, to learn that the pirated ePub edition has more circulation and readers than the printed edition.’
Hm, debatable. If we were to believe the current statistics, the ebook readership isn’t that big, not when comparing with the print book readership. From what I understand, an ebook reader is roughly one in fifteen readers. This suggests it’s not possible for the pirated-or-not epub edition to outperform the print edition.
Informal sales reports, such as this – http://pimpmynovel.blogspot.com/2009/09/it-was-under-couch-cushion-whole-time.html – somewhat backs it up. To be fair, the high volume of sales may be because the majority of book retailers including those online, such as Amazon.co.uk – are heavily discounting copies of The Lost Symbol, from £18.99 to £9.99/£5.00.
[…] Undesirable from buying legal copies, I’m hardly surprised to learn from Mike Cane of the pirated edition seen […]
[…] blog that illustrates that the ebook version of the Lost Symbol had it's DRM broken in 14 minutes. How The Axis Of E Is Killing Publishing The eBook Test Here is an article on Chinese readers doing their own crowd sourced translation of the Lost Symbol […]