It just came out yesterday, but Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, has already been pirated far and wide on the internet.

The book's publisher has acknowledged its appearance on pirate and mainstream websites alike, and adds that it is being aggressive in having illegal copies of the book removed. Earlier this morning, the book was available for reading online at the popular content distribution site Scribd.com, in addition to appearing in webtorrent form on numerous pirate websites.

The Scribd version has since been deleted, but torrents of the book remain readily available with the simplest of web searches. Scribd has become a popular source for readers who want access to recently-published books but don't want to pay money for them. Scribd's policy is to delete any content that infringes on copyright, but that often takes hours or days as a copyright holder has to actually file a complaint before action is taken -- or until Scribd discovers the content on its own.

Meanwhile those paying for the book certainly have plenty of options to obtain it legally, and those who want a digital version seem to be in the majority. As of this writing, Amazon's Kindle version of the book is apparently outselling the hardcover version on the site, a surprise considering the overall market for the book and the relatively small number of readers who are likely to have Kindles. Could pre-orders of the hardcover have outweighed people who waited for the book to actually hit shelves, thus causing the discrepancy? You can pre-order Kindle titles too, but perhaps this just isn't very popular among the instant-access crowd.

Meanwhile The Lost Symbol is on a torrential (no pun intended) sales streak, piracy or not, in online and offline venues. The highly-anticipated novel centers around a story about a symbol that is lost.