Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, reports that sales of electronic copies of Dan Brown’s latest best seller “The Lost Symbol” are exceeding print copies. This announcement is obviously a promotion for both the book and Amazon’s book reading Kindle device. I don’t have a dedicated book reader, but I do have both a computer and an iPod Touch either of which can be used to read ebooks. It also occurred to me that if a book is released in an electronic format that it should look pretty good. This is far and away a significant improvement over the “old” days when OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software was used to analyze scanned images and convert them to text. Most formatting was lost in the process and numerous characters were incorrectly converted. And finally, I thought, a clever hacker should be able to crack or circumvent the DRM protection included in a legally purchased copy.

Therefore, I was not surprised (in fact I was amused) to see a PDF version of the book circulating on a well known P2P file sharing site. Comments on the post (it was a torrent file) were very positive. The only negative comments were on the book’s content and not its appearance. When I became a dedicated Linux user any guilt I had in using pirated software was shed. All the software I need is free. But now a newer temptation has taken its place. Sigh!

Technorati Tags: iPhone, ebook, OCR, P2P, Dan Brown