Paulo Coelho Books Banned In Iran... So He Offers Them As A Free Download

There are few successful authors who have jumped in and embraced what the online world allows you to do more than Paulo Coelho. Three years ago, we wrote about his efforts to "pirate" his own books and how he found that it only served to help his sales. He's also talked up the importance for authors of setting ideas free to help them spread. He's also gone even further than that with cool experiments like having his fans make a movie out of one of his books, via a sort of crowdsourcing methodology.

Esahc points us to a recent situation in which Coelho heard that his books were suddenly being banned in Iran for no reason (despite having been published there for over a dozen years), and his immediate response was to rush to get versions of his books that have been translated into Farsi up on his site for free downloads. He also sought the assistance of the Brazilian government to find out why the books were banned (as he notes, nothing changed in the books, so it doesn't make much sense) and, eventually, the Iranian government claimed that it's not censoring his books, even though his official publisher in the country claims otherwise. Either way, it's interesting to see that his immediate response to being censored was to release the books for free as quickly as possible.

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110114/17013412678/paulo-coelho-books-banned-iran-so-he-offers-them-as-free-download.shtml

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