The piracy debate doesn’t stop at music.

The stakes are high. On one side are the internet pirates who are offering digital copies of the latest bestsellers such as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol for free. On the other are the authors and publishers who are determined to stop the £5 billion-a-year UK books market going the way of the music industry, which has seen revenues halve as a result of illegal downloads.

As The Mail on Sunday whetted the public’s appetite for Brown’s new novel by offering an exclusive chance to read key chapters of The Lost Symbol for free ahead of the book’s official launch on September 15, websites around the world were gearing up with their free offering of the same book – but this time totally illegally.

The novel has since become widely available on many websites infamous for offering free pirated music and movie downloads, with growing demand stimulated by the launch of a new generation of pocket-sized electronic devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and the Apple iPhone that enable consumers to carry and read digital books as easily as paper ones.

To read the full article see MailOnline.