Dan Brown's "Lost Symbol" Pirated One Day After Publication

Dan Brown's "Lost Symbol" Pirated One Day After Publication: "
This isn't a post on the merits of Dan Brown's writing, but rather focusing squarely on the issue of pirated e-books. Brown's new novel, 'The Lost Symbol,' has been widely pirated online only one day after publication. This is the long-awaited 'Da Vinci Code' sequel that has been referred to by some in the media as crucial to the future health of the book publishing business.

There obviously needs to be another revenue model for books. The pirating is not going to stop. Digital books are not going to get less popular and more obscure. At some point, it is going to be expected that any book that is released has to be offered in a digital as well as paper format. And these digitized books are likely to be pirated soon after release.

Is the answer offering new e-books at steep discounts? If you offer the new Dan Brown novel for a $5 download, and you're a fan of Brown anyway, it would really just be a dick move not just to pay the money and get the legal download for such a cheap price. 'No! I will not pay $5 for a new bestseller! Corporate America will not have my five dollars!!!'

As for me, I've taken a big step backward and have gotten back into reading the most used, wrinkled, smelly old books I can possibly find (on the street). The question is: is my decrepit free/found copy of this or that taking away hard-earned money from the coffers of the author (or author's estate) in question?

Or is this a matter far beyond digital vs. paper, legal vs illegal downloading? For in this culture, outside of our collective 'canon' (Brown, Rowling, King, etc.), do the majority of people even have the patience to devote a week or two or ten to some giant chunky book full of words? Do these books need to be cut up, like food on a toddler's plate, into manageable bite-sized pieces to be consumed on an iPhone? Do they need to include animated pictures or perhaps an embedded video game? Can they be Tweeted?

These questions, plus many more, are why usually I am inclined to just keep my day job, plunk my writing free on the Internet, and just not even bother to track it. And so the writing becomes more of just an exercise, the end-result of a solitary marathon around the block several hundred times, the artifacts of a churning mind. And this might not exactly be a revenue model, but it is a model.