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Old 10-14-2013, 09:14 PM   #1
Katsunami
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Strange encounter: An official ebook you can buy nowhere...

Today I was checking my bookshelf to see which books I still need to replace with ebook editions (and re-read) so I can give away/sell my paperbacks. I hit a book of which I immediately thought: This is going near the top of my TBR list. (This book I actually have as a hardcover, and wouldn't give it away.)

So, I went to some EPUB-shops... and didn't find it. I went to Amazon... and didn't find it. Jumped some geo-restriction hoops into different countries... and didn't find it.

Punched it into a search engine, and the first link was a *direct download* of an EPUB. I expected a crappy OCR version created 10 years ago or something, which is mostly the case with books that are unavailable as ebooks.

Imagine my surprise after I opened this download with Sigil. Everybody who ever opened an original book, nows the layout of a retail ebook of one of the big publishers.

Layout and markup: absolutely perfect.
Dropcaps, graphics: all there (and there are A LOT of them).
Metadata: complete, except publisher, and year of publication.

This is maybe one of the most perfectly put together ebooks I ever opened up in Sigil. It looks as if it is 100% retail, but it can not be acquired in ANY store I know of, while any search engine finds this book in several not-so-legal places, within mere seconds.

How is this possible; a retail ebook that can't actually be bought anywhere?! Could it be that this ebook was published, sold for some time, and later pulled because of some sort of a problem?

And now the big problem.... what has been seen, cannot be unseen. I could read the paper book I have on my shelf, but I do have a perfect ebook version that doesn't actually exist...

Last edited by Katsunami; 10-14-2013 at 09:25 PM.
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