By Matt Frisch, CNN, January 1, 2010


"When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in
September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling. On
Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in
its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of
a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come
at a cost. Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies
of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and
BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than
100,000 times."