Let’s begin by talking about not-quite-books.

I got a call from a friend last week who asked why, out of 240,000 books available on Amazon’s Kindle digital reader, not one book of Nabokov’s can be found. He pointed out that he can buy a digital version of all of Dickens’s works for only $4.95. So, why not even one of Nabokov’s at any price?

All I could tell him was that first of all, Dickens is in the public domain and Nabokov isn’t. And second of all, as far as I know, Dmitri Nabokov, in the process of controlling the rights to all of his father’s works, has not licensed any of them for digital publication. Will he change his mind? Maybe, if the price is right. Apparently it’s also not quite right either for John Grishem or J.K. Rowling. In the meantime, without much difficulty, you can find many of Nabokov’s works in text files (though they are unauthorized—the equivalent of piracies—and probably full of typos) across the internet.