Latin American literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez has won the last laugh on book pirates by finely tuning the ending of his latest novel.
The launch of the Spanish-language version of the book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was brought forward a week because bootleg copies have begun appearing on the streets of his native Colombia.
But the pirate copies are not the same as the final version of the book, 77-year-old Garcia Marquez's first novel in 10 years, editor Braulio Peralta said.
"Check the pirate version that is coming out in Colombia compared to the legal version being launched today. All I'm saying is that Gabriel Garcia Marquez changed the last chapter," Peralta told journalists.
Colombian police seized thousands of cheap bootleg versions of the book published before the Nobel laureate made his final touches for artistic reasons, he said.
"There were some atmospheric feelings (in the chapter) that needed or required certain words to be exchanged for others," Peralta, of publishers Random House Mondadori, said at the book's Mexican launch.
The novel, of 109 pages, tells of a 90-year-old Colombian man in the 1950s who dwells on his memories of former loves.
Author of One Hundred Years of Solitudeand Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez made the "magic realism" style of Latin American fiction famous and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
The English-language version of his latest book has yet to be published. Garcia Marquez is a long time resident of Mexico.
He has suffered from lymph cancer in recent years and makes few public appearances. His acclaimed autobiography Living To Tell The Talewas published last year.