On the same day when gunmen murdered 12 people and injured many more at the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, a controversial new novel by Michel Houellebecq - who graces the cover of the magazine's current issue - hits bookstores.
In the days leading up to the end of 2014, Houellebecq's novel, Soumission (Submission), was already making headlines when a copy was uploaded to cyberspace two weeks ago, first as a poorly copied PDF, then in EPUB and MOBI formats. According to the blog Aldus, it's the first time in France that a pirated version of a book appears in a digitized version before the official launch. Articles proliferated to the point that a journalist colleague posted on her Facebook page that during the period before and after the release of Houellebecq's book, she would temporarily "unfollow" all her friends who were regularly quoting extracts from the PDF.
