CHONGQING -- Colonel Guo Jiwei could be forgiven for thinking his novel "Bet the Next Bullet" was to make him rich, but he has to acknowledge defeat as somebody simply reprints and sells thousands of unauthorized copies of his work.

Guo's 470,000-word novel was published by the Liberation Army Press in June 2004 but now, said the 39-year-old author, the market is flooded with pirated copies in which only the author's name is changed.

Critics give good reviews to Bet the Next Bullet, saying it is a rare good piece of writing that clearly explains high-tech military medical science with excellent plot lines.

"My painstaking research and writing has just been so easily and casually stolen," sighed Guo, waving a copycat edition he just bought through the mail. "This is even sold by online bookstores," he said.

Guo, who has to just bite the bullet and let the pirates ruin any chance he had of making money from his work, is at least happy the unauthorized copy is pretty good quality. "Fortunately, the copycaters of Bet the Next Bullet did not change the content, and there aren't many typographical errors," he said.

Guo is far from the only victim of China's literary pirates.

Street vendors can be seen on many street corners with their flat bed tricycles stacked with copycat publications. They usually come out at night when police patrols searching counterfeit goods have finished working.

Pirated publications cover a broad range of topics, from politics, history, health, romance, military, and even porn.

Publishers said literature with a military theme is hot as the army is seen as mysterious and interesting.

Potential profits for pirates are huge, said Hou Jianfei, an editor with the Liberation Army Press, adding that almost all of the half dozen military novels he worked on in recent years were re-printed by pirates.

"The press and novelists are getting so used to it that we sometimes consider piracy as an honour for books that really sell, " he said with a wry sense of humor, explaining that publishers are cash-strapped and have few resources to do anything about the piracy.

The Chinese government has organized a series of police crackdowns and tougher court sentences for people who steal intellectual property. More than 58 million illegal publications were seized nationwide in the latest 100-day crackdown that lasted from mid-July to October, police authorities announced on Friday.