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At the moment, this tactic is not legal in the US; there is no private right to punish criminals--even if you can prove they *are* criminals, which many of them aren't--and less right to take action against civil offenders, which is what most copyright infringers are.
If this were a feasible plan, the music industry would've put it in place years ago.
What are they going to do, write a program that looks like an ebook, that seizes your computer when you load it into Calibre? Somehow, I don't see that working. Most people don't double-click on ebooks to read them, even if they are working with a computer that (1) will open something that doesn't match its file extension and (2) won't ask permission to run a strange program.
All it takes is one case where a downloader can legitimately claim a fair use reason to download--or being in a country where it's legal (like visiting Canada and downloading texts that are in the public domain there but not in the US)--and they've got grounds for a whopping lawsuit against the publisher. They'd have some grounds even if they downloaded illegally; there is no clickthrough license that says "we have the right to destroy your computer if you didn't buy this book from us."
On the practical side of things... what, they're gonna make a virus that bricks people's Kindles or Nooks? They've figured out how to infect iPads?
At best, they can do things like "release a torrent ebook with the last third missing, or garbled." And convince people that torrents have low-quality products, and therefore it's okay to get stuff for free from them.
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