Why should I provide my email address?

Start saving money today with our FREE daily newsletter packed with the best FREE and bargain Kindle book deals. We will never share your email address!
Sign Up Now!

How About a Kindle Controversy with Your Thanksgiving Turkey? Pirated Version of Salinger’s THE CATCHER IN THE RYE Shows Up at $1.35 on Kindle

by Steve Windwalker, BookGorilla.com

Here at BookGorilla we’re all about discovering and sharing incredible Kindle deals on bestselling books that our subscribers actually want to read, and this one would be at the top of the list on both counts … if only it were legit.

But early this morning — as we worked to serve up great Thanksgiving Day deals on books by John Grisham, J.K. Rowling, Lee Child, David Baldacci, Nicholas Sparks, George R.R. Martin and others — we happened upon an ebook version of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for sale in the Kindle store for just $1.35. We frankly didn’t care about the $1.35 price tag — it would be huge news at any price point.

Had there been some stunning tectonic shift in copyright claims overnight? Was it Jeff Bezos’ greatest get ever? Or just a study guide posing as the real thing?

None of the above, apparently. We downloaded the book and did a quick check in the initial pages as well as at several points further in to verify that the text offered is the text of the novel. Check.

But there were several very strong signals that this edition was not uploaded by a representative of the Salinger estate — the rather litigious Salinger estate, we might add — or anyone acting on the estate’s behalf:

  • The author’s name is spelled wrong on the Kindle page;
  • The “cover image” is the same kind of inelegant, unprofessional image that is often associated with public domain titles; and
  • The formatting throughout the text is inelegant and suggests that its production was generated by OCR scanning.

We know thousands will want to download this edition regardless of its provenance. But we would be remiss not to offer the caveat that it will not only be removed soon from the Kindle Store, but also — in all likelihood — from people’s Kindles, as well.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!