Just got a Google Alert that told me that RapidShare and BitTorrent sites are advertising that they have “Mobile Web Design for Dummies” for immediate download.

Which is interesting, since I’m currently just finishing chapter 10.  Apparently, they’ve managed to create some sort of space-time discontinuity, whereby they can offer pirated intellectual property before it has actually been created.  Which is a good job, because I’d kinda like to get the damn book so I can see how I handled the chapter on backwards-compatible WAP sites, and my wife, partner & co-author Janine Warner would dearly love to be able to shortcut the whole author-review process on the heavy-duty CSS chapters.

The only thing I can think of is that this is some botfarm/malware site that has set up scrapers to get the titles for every Dummies book published, and then Blackhat SEO this shit out of the vaporware books to try to hoodwink content would-be content pirates into downloading some kind of heinous Trojan virus. I’d be tempted to pronounce a pox on all their houses, but I’ve found through my work internationally that many of the people who download the e-books for free later want to have a hardcopy to refer to.

UPDATE: Just tried to download my own book, and found a screenful of gibberish like: 5DAH4UCCHGQQ