You can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com. Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.
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Total e-book sales [according to the AAP], though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.
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Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, said: “Everybody in the industry considers piracy a significant issue, but it’s been difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem. We know people post things but we don’t know how many people take them.”
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Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. It says its customers have uploaded onto its servers more than 10 petabytes of files — that’s more than 10 million gigabytes — and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can .upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free. RapidShare does not list the files — a user must know the impossible-to-guess U.R.L. in order to download one***.
Ed Note. *** Not so fast. We did just two or three minutes of searching using general purpose search engines and noticed that there are numerous keyword search tools to find and access content from the RapidShare database. They appear to be from third parties. Sometimes they’re not easy to use (of course, we didn’t test them all) and you’ll need the right tools to decompress certain file formats. But the point is that these search databases are available. After some brief testing of the four engines listed below, it appears that each RapidShare search engine is not tapping the complete RapidShare database since we received considerably different results from each search tool.
Four examples (we found more) are:
+ Rapid Library
+ RapidQueen
+ Rapid-Share-Search-Engine
+ RapidShareSearch.com
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At my request, Attributor, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that offers publishers antipiracy services, did a search last week to see how many e-book copies of “The Lost Symbol” were available free on the Web. After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.
Much More in the Complete Article
Source: NY Times
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