Authorities have caught two Ho Chi Minh City-based firms printing more than 15,000 pirated copies of books and 2024 calendars, with a combined weight exceeding 15 metric tons.
Police officers from the Ministry of Public Security and the city, in coordination with inspectors from the municipal Department of Information and Communications on Monday morning raided Kien A Packing Production and Trading Service Company in the city’s outlying Cu Chi District.
The company was caught with 3,000 illegally printed copies of ‘Kinh Truong Tho diet toi’ (Long-life sutra destroys sins) from Ton giao (religion) Publishing House and 9,000 illegally printed copies of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ from the Writers’ Association Publishing House. The combined weight of the books was 10 metric tons.
Authorities had not given their approval for the books to be printed. All of the illegally copies have since been seized.
When we were in Vietnam many years ago, I bought probably half a dozen books to read I’m the train. They were things like Da Vinci Code, some Clive Cussler, probably a Stephen King book or two. Basically popular English titles at the time.
All clearly dodgy copies, with 16 colour covers and poor quality print and paper. All clearly from a place like this as they were being sold EVERYWHERE by street vendors. Given I was only there for a couple of weeks I wasn’t concerned about the quality as I wasn’t planning on keeping them long term.
Without exception, every book was hugely flawed. Missing chapters, half the book just repeated, pages only half printed, random Harry Potter pages in the middle of Da Vinci Code, etc.
I kept them just for the fun factor. Never did finish Da Vinci Code (as in legitimately). I did read the first half twice though!
There is no such thing as a illigal book
I’m no theological expert, but I believe reading “Long-life sutra destroys sins” cancels out pirating it.
This is a country where you walk(ride) on the streets and can buy sim card with no ID, windows flashdrives with an activator bundled, and visit internet cafés and play any game there directly from repackers
Somewhat ironic that the source material of the bulk of this “bust” is from a work that’s IP is in the public domain.
