Cryptonomicon 2 and 3?!

Yesterday a friend pointed out to me that Cryptonomicon 2 and 3 were available on Amazon. Since Cryptonomicon is one of my favorites books this left me with my mouth watering almost literaly.... until I realized that this is really a publishing strategy imployed by the publisher of Cryptonomicon in Spanish language: splitting one book into three and selling them separately. I heard about this before but didn't remember it immediately. It did however remind me on just how hard it was to come by SF and other reading material (say books on programming?) before the advent of Amazon.com and credit cards (I'm talking about situation in then Yugoslavia in the '80s and '90s) Most of people used to totally depend on the few and sorry translations of local publishers (I was one of the lucky ones - but more on that in another post) From what I hear situation is much better these days exactly because the local publishers these days have to compete with Amazon.com and the likes.