Australian daily deal site Cudo, which is backed by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), has a great deal for you if you like pirated e-books. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, anyone?
From Thursday through this morning, Cudo sold a 7-inch, $99, “color touchscreen,” off-brand, Chinese (judging from the appearance of the icons on the home screen) e-reader bundled with 4,000 e-books on a CD.
The deal was first noticed on Metafilter (and picked up by John Scalzi, who called it “the stupidest thing I have seen on the Internet in a very long time”). A Metafilter user notes that the listing originally included:
a link to the 4000 titles, which has since been removed. The title list includes many best seller books from authors such as J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, Stephen King, Bill Bryson and Jack Kerouac amongst others. The list originally had the heading: 4001_ibooks_for_iphone_and_ipad_epub. 5832264.TPB.torrent Which corresponds to files on the Pirate Bay, and other torrent sites.
The list, removed from Cudo’s original listing but still here, includes many titles under copyright — in addition to those mentioned above, there’s Dan Brown, Clive Cussler and so on.
The deal ended today. As of yesterday, over 2,000 e-readers had been sold. I’ve asked Cudo how it’s going to fulfill the orders, whether it will include the CD of pirated titles, and how this happened in the first place.
via Teleread

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