Its controversial nature has made it the ‘must read at all costs’ book for several readers.
Even though writer Perumal Murugan has requested that all his publishers pull Mathorupagan (One Part Woman in English) and all his previous works out of circulation, there has been a concerted movement online to circulate copies of the book — in PDF and other digital formats. Some readers had scanned the book as PDF files and circulated them on several online forums, especially on social networks Facebook and Twitter.
One of the more active members of the Tamil software community, T. Shrinivasan formatted the content to fit the Kindle e-ink reader and Apple’s iPad tablets. In online forum ‘Panbudan’, there were requests from visually-impaired readers to convert the PDF files into a Microsoft Word document format that would enable them to use their text-to-speech converter and listen to the novel.
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Manjoor Raja, an active member of the forum living in the Middle East, obliged and converted the novel into an accessible Tamil Unicode format.