Illegal activity can sometimes be an excellent barometer of a society's soul.
You might, therefore, either leap dangerously close to your chandelier or bang your forehead against your winkle pickers in despair when I reveal to you the list of most pirated e-books of 2009.
I am grateful to the hardened aesthetes at Freakbits who have obtained this list from someone they met on a street corner. Wait, no. This list actually comes from BitTorrent's tally of nefarious downloads.
You will, no doubt, be expecting that the pirates of the Nook and Kindle would have reached for novels of airport quality. You know, James Patterson, Dan Brown, and the dripping anguish of Nicholas Sparks.
You will, no doubt, not have your finger on any kind of bookish Bluebeard's pulse.
Proof that this is an important tome. Even the great Deepak Chopra has a version.
(Credit: CC Dan4th/Flickr)For the No. 1 illegal download in 2009 was the "Kama Sutra." The Indian manual for so many things sexual managed to beat out another manual of fundamental interest to a pirate's survival on the tossing tempests of this world: "Adobe Photoshop Secrets."
My own feeling, from deep beneath my T-shirt, is that the "Kama Sutra" and "Adobe Photoshop Secrets" have largely been downloaded by the same people for entirely related purposes. However, I cannot prove it, so let us move seamlessly beyond the steamy and attempt to find calmer waters.
Oh, dear. At No. 3, we have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex." Followed, with geometric nerdy symmetry, by "The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci." Then, perhaps suggesting an interest in a post baby-making period, we have "Solar House--A Guide for the Solar Designer."
But no sooner were the pirates leaning toward domesticity when up at No. 6 popped "Before Pornography--Erotic Writing In Early Modern England."
The complete series of "Twilight" provided respite at No. 7, before, one imagines, the searing sexual frustration of the yet to shave slammed in again at No. 8 with "How To Get Anyone To Say YES--The Science Of Influence."
At No. 9, please welcome "Nude Photography--The Art And The Craft." And rounding out the extremely rounded and optimistic persona of the illegal e-book downloader we have, at No. 10, "Fix It--How To Do All Those Little Repair Jobs Around The Home."
It is sometimes those who break the law in their youth (and I feel confident so many illegal downloaders have fresh dirt behind their ears) who do, indeed, rise up and become leaders of companies, even of nations.
So I am giddy in the knowledge that that the world may soon be run by people whose primary obsessions are sex and building things.
(Credit:
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California)
Start-up Spring Design has been denied an injunction to halt Barnes & Noble from selling its Nook e-reader, according to court documents.
The company had requested the injunction, in addition to monetary damages, as part of a recent lawsuit filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif. The suit charges that the bookseller misappropriated Spring Design trade secrets in the design of its Nook, which launched October 20, the day after Spring Design announced its Alex e-book reader.
The court's decision (PDF), based on a Monday hearing, denies Spring Design's request for a preliminary injunction, but states that a halt to sales could still be appropriate if the plaintiff ultimately prevails. The court also says it will expedite the pre-trial process to accommodate Spring's request for an early hearing.
Barnes & Noble does not comment on litigation as a matter of policy, a company spokeswoman said Wednesday. CNET has contacted Spring Design for a comment and is waiting to hear back.
The Nook, like Spring Design's Alex (which has yet to be released), combines a color touch screen with an e-ink display, and both readers use the Android operating system. In its lawsuit, Spring Design said it showed its plans for the Alex to Barnes & Noble, which showed interest in the product and gave no indication it was working on a similar device.
So sales of the Nook will move forward for now, though not without hitches of a non-legal sort.
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The Nook
(Credit: Barnes & Noble)Demand is so strong for the Nook that Barnes & Noble has begun telling new customers not to expect delivery of the soon-to-be-released e-reader until the second week of December.
When the nation's largest bookseller unveiled the device in October, customers placing early preorders were told they could expect the Nook to ship by the end of November; customers placing preorders now are being told they can expect shipment by December 11. The new shipping date was first reported by Brighthand.com.
A Barnes & Noble representative confirmed the December 11 shipping date but disputed the characterization of the new shipping date as a delay.
"Like with any hot, new consumer device, the sooner you order it, the sooner you receive it," said Mary Ellen Keating, senior vice president of corporate communications and public affairs. "We had high expectations for the Nook and couldn't be happier" with preorder sales. However, she declined to say how many of the e-readers had been preordered.
"We are working hard to meet demand for the holidays," she said.
Earlier this month, start-up Spring Design filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, alleging the bookseller misappropriated its trade secrets in the design of the Nook. Spring Design had announced its Alex e-reader just days before Barnes & Noble formally unveiled the Nook. Both e-readers use the Android operating system and combine an e-ink screen with a color touch screen. It seeks both monetary damages and a halt to sales of the Nook.
The $259 Nook, a challenger to Amazon.com's Kindle, will join an expected boom in e-reader sales. In a report released last month, Forrester Research raised its 2009 forecast for e-reader sales in the United States to 3 million units from its previous prediction of 2 million sales. Forrester also expects Amazon's Kindle to command about 60 percent of the e-reader market in 2009, compared with 35 percent for Sony's Reader.
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