Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web

Digital piracy is all too familiar to filmmakers and musicians, but to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it's new and frightening territory. For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the "Harry Potter" series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.