“Some Mondays at the end of November, or at the beginning of December, especially if you are a bachelor, you have the feeling of being in the corridor of death. The summer holidays have long been forgotten, the new year is still far away: the proximity of nowhere is unusual ». This is the incipit of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, “Anéantir” (Annihilate), which with a circulation of 300,000 copies Flammarion will release in French bookstores on 7 January (on the same day it will be published in Italy by La nave di Teseo). But several versions of the book are already circulating for free on the Internet because pirated copies have been circulated. The Parisian publishing house has already put its lawyers and IT technicians to work to “block the illegal circulation of the book and contain news leaks.”
The 736-page novel was sent to the French press on Friday 17 December with an embargo: it is forbidden to publish a single line before December 30, a week before publication. Thus the pirate previews of the literary event of 2022, the work of the most controversial, feared and revered author from across the Alps, caused great uproar on social media after the announcement by a fan of the French writer that he had bought the novel on a website and to have read it in two days. According to what the French press writes, the pirated book would look exactly like the novel’s e-book format, which would have been scanned and illegally downloadable from at least three websites, to which other homepages would be cascaded.
This isn’t the first time Houellebecq has been hacked. At the end of December 2014, “Submission”, which was supposed to be released on January 7, 2015, was also pirated. The hacker was strongly suspected of having scanned, by unsophisticated means, a copy intended for a journalist. The case was not solved: no investigation, no culprits for this flagrant copyright infringement. This time the illegal “Annihilate” pdf file does not seem to come from a journalist (moreover 600 people have already received a copy). The book’s Isbn code is incomplete, with ‘Xs’ in place of the last seven digits. The scan appears to be done from loose sheets not bound in volume, while reporters received a volume ready for sale.