The prologue to the next Wheel of Time book, The Gathering Storm, was released in e-book format last week and immediately leaked to the BitTorrent peer to peer file-sharing system.
The last three books in The Wheel of Time are being written by established fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, who was selected by the widow of the original author, Robert Jordan, after tragically passed away in September 2007 to finish Jordan’s masterpiece. The first book, The Gathering Storm, has already been finished and will be published internationally on October 27.
Last week, Wheel of Time publisher Tor Books made the prologue to The Gathering Storm available for sale in various e-book formats for US$2.99, from sites like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, iTunes and audible.com. The publisher had already released the first chapter to The Gathering Storm online for free and plans to gradually release all of the existing series as e-books.
However, on BitTorrent site Mininova, several dozen people are sharing The Gathering Storm prologue for free, with another dozen downloading it, although Keeping the Door has not downloaded the file to verify if it is accurate. There are also many more people downloading the previous Robert Jordan books in the series, in PDF and audio forms.
On his blog last week, Sanderson wrote that he had received complaints about the prologue being sold with digital rights management attached, or about it being in limited e-book formats. However, he pointed out that at least one seller was providing the prologue as a simple PDF file.
“To be honest, I’m not sure what I think of selling the prologue ahead of time,” he wrote. “I’m not a fan of charging people multiple times for the same content. But it’s been established practice for the WoT for a while now, and the length of the prologue makes it worth the money.”
The BitTorrent leak follows a similar situation with Dan Brown’s highly anticipated book The Lost Symbol, which has already been downloaded tens of thousands of times on BitTorrent.
Commentary
This was always going to happen; any time someone asks people to charge for content, the internet is going to find a way around it.
In today’s digital age, the morality of downloading pirated content from BitTorrent and other peer to peer file-sharing systems is a highly debated topic. I’m reluctant to go into it here, beyond noting that many authors see the practice as depriving them of remuneration for their work, while some, such as Paulo Coelho, author of the best-selling The Alchemist, see it as free publicity.
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7 Responses to New Wheel of Time prologue hits BitTorrent
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I’ve read the WoT series to date, and thought I’d go buy the Prologue, given it’s less than the price of a coffee.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell my only option IS to Pirate the book. They don’t sell it to Australians.
Amazon? Kindle (US) only.
B&N? US Only
Powells? Same.
I give up.
If they want my money, give me a way to pay for it that doesn’t involve either living in the US, or installing/buying some proprietary software.
The Webscription guys got it right – make it simple and easy to pay and get the books in a huge number of formats. I’ve bought about USD$400 worth of books from them over the last few years.
Yeah it’s a pain in the ass … we can’t even get the Kindle in Australia, and most of the options contain DRM.
Apparently, according to Sanderson, there is a PDF option. I’m not that stressed about reading the prologue just yet, so I haven’t checked every site. I’m not going to personally pirate it.
I would start to buy all my books in e-form if I could get a good reader at the right price and the books without DRM!
It’s hardly surprising that people would pirate it, given that it’s a pretty cynical ploy to extra a little bit of extra money from the die hard fans who want to read the prologue a little bit early.
It would feel like less of a rip off if they offered the digital download of the prologue free for those who pre-ordered from certain booksellers, and probably make fair economic sense as well (by increasing the amount of pre-orders). I wouldn’t feel at all like I was doing something immoral if I downloaded a pirated copy of the prologue (not that I can really be bothered), given that I will buy the book once it comes out anyway, I wouldn’t feel like I was “depriving” anyone of deserved income.
I agree with your comments about offering the digital download free if you pre-ordered; this sort of thing is pretty common in the computer gaming world; get a bonus for being an early committed customer.
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audible.com has the prologue and can be played on i-tunes.
no special software
Thanks for the tip! But I think I will wait for the book itself in a couple of weeks :)