Pirate copies of Anéantir, the new Houellebecq, available two weeks before its release

When the first buyers rush to bookstores on January 7 for the new Michel Houellebecq,

, others will have already read a pirate copy downloaded before Christmas.

And the scorned author can not do anything about it, like his publisher, Flammarion.

Many sites illegally offer thousands of free e-books, earning money from intrusive advertisements.

The vast majority are books already published: just buy the digital version, and make it available to everyone.

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But in the case of a book as awaited as a novel by Houellebecq, one of the French authors the most translated and sold abroad, with 300,000 copies planned for this release, it was necessary to obtain a copy beforehand.

Which is much more difficult ... but not impossible, obviously.

"It seems that the text is already circulating on the networks, in a quality PDF, according to the echoes that I have"

, wrote on Twitter, on Tuesday, a blogger specializing in electronic books, Hervé Bienvault. On Wednesday,

the first to relay the information, talking about a PDF file on a website that claimed to have another Twitter user. There are in fact, notes AFP, two sites where we find this quality copy as well as a third site which allows to obtain, still illegally, an Epub version (intended for e-readers), filled with computer slag.

Hervé Bienvault evokes that day "8,000 downloads on a single Quebec site", and

such as "a Russian server" and

.

Contacted by AFP, the publisher Flammarion replied that its legal and IT departments were doing their best to obtain the closure of the internet pages in question.

It is to sink into an infernal maze.

For example, the first website on which Flammarion found

is domiciled in the United States, then links to various storage sites domiciled in France, Germany and the United States.

To succeed in "killing" all these internet pages, the steps are extremely tedious.

Not a journalist's copy

This is not the first time that Houellebecq has been hacked. At the end of December 2014,

, which was due for release on January 7, 2015, had also been hacked. At the time, it was unheard of in France. The pirate was strongly suspected of having scanned, with unsophisticated means, a copy intended for a journalist. The case will not be followed up: no investigation, no culprit of this flagrant violation of copyright.

This time the illegal PDF file of

end of 2021 does not appear to come from a journalist. The Book Identifier (ISBN) number is not complete, with "X's" in place of the last seven digits, while print copies have a full ISBN. And on the other hand the scan, impeccable, appears to be made from sheets printed flat, not bound in volume, while the journalists have received a volume ready for sale.

Flammarion wrote to them, in mid-December:

other words, to reveal nothing of the content of the 736 pages.

But a week before the deadline, they are no longer the only ones to have read the novel.

E-book piracy remains poorly punished.

A single case in the matter ended up in French justice: in May, the correctional court of Nanterre sentenced nine people, members of the "Team AlexandriZ" who had pirated nearly 24,000 titles between 2010 and 2013.