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I think it's rather like bailing out the ocean with a coffee cup myself. Not that someone should upload pirate books but say one person loads a copy of Dracula onto the web via torrent or something. Say 100 people download it, and only half go on to seed it, and they each attract 100 people and so on. Before the author or publisher is even aware that the book is being pirated it's already too late to keep it from happening. Book publishers have always lost some $ on books. Besides people borrowing library books rather than buying a copy and buying used copies at used book stores there is also the idea of 'remainders.' Basically the publisher sends out say 100 copies of a book to a particular store, and only 45 say are bought. The store rips off the front covers of the unsold books and returns them to the publisher for credit. So technically even though 100 went out 55 copies came back to be pulped and their paper reused. Though I imagine not all of those copies made it back in some cases anyway because if you look inside many pbooks now there is usually a notice that if this book has no cover it is probably stolen since it was reported to the publisher as having been destroyed. The medium of transmission has changed and the # of copies that can be stolen has increased but it's a very old problem.
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