Pirates post purloined copies of new Dan Brown novel on Web

You can buy The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown as a Kindle ebook for $9.99 at Amazon.com. Or, if you’re not quite honest, you can download a free pirated copy from an online site such as RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.
Those pirated copies are blamed for being at least partially responsible for declining hardcover sales.
The Association of American Publishers estimates that hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008 versus the previous year. This year, hardback sales were down 15.5 percent through July versus the same period of 2008.
Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remain a small part of the overall book market, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.
Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, says: “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.”
Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland, says its customers have uploaded more than 10 petabytes of files to its site - more than 10 million gigabytes - and that it 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 URL in order to download a document. But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the URL and a description somewhere online, in a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.