HarryT - People who have spent alot of time looking up copyright laws and checking titles still have debates on this site as to what is and isn't applicable and you think the average person should know better? Come on, I have no problem that we disagree on the laws (Or more precisely on the means of enforcing those laws), but that really is stretching it.
Your average person who would be looking for a ebook copy of The Hobbit might first try their regular eBookstore, Amazon or whatever. After finding out it isn't there they might Google it. Googling (and I won't post direct links) 'The Hobbit ebook' has as its first hit a PDF copy of the text. Nothing indicating anything illegal about it. I didn't, for obvious reasons, download it to verify it isn't a plant but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't real. Several other hits are to torrents and such. Even supposing that that should trigger an immediate flag of nefarious dealings why would that tell someone that the first isn't up to snuff? I have googled many books that have had torrent hits on the first page intermixed with legimate hits for Fictionwise and others. Should I then asume by that search that Fictionwise is distributing illegal copies (If I didn't know them to start)?
Out of curiousity I decided to take a known PD title in exactly the same context, "Animal Farm ebook" on Google. And there were torrent hits on the first page as well. And when you go to many of these sites it isn't as if they have "You are committing a crime" in bold brazen letters. In fact, many have "You are NOT committing a crime" in bold brazen letters, even though you are.
And that is assuming they have any idea when the author died. You could convince most people that John Grisham wrote his books a hundred years ago and that Alexander Dumas just agreed to cowrite a new series with J.K. Rowling.
-MJ