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Interesting -- I'd missed the scanlation phenomenon. (I always got my manga fix with the Japanese originals or Chinese translations with a separate text file for the English.)
I agree that the change in stance by Japanese companies is probably due to the growing market in the US, and that's partly my point. Japanese companies did look the other way when the market was immature; I contend that the eBook market is similarly immature now and book publishers would do well to tacitly condone eBook filesharing, especially for older works. They shouldn't ignore it, though -- noting which text files are worth sharing around (and which are even worth formatting in RTF, PDF, etc. -- Harry Potter, anyone?) could give them a good idea of the strength of the market for those titles and authors, just as noting which fansubs and scanlations were popular gave American translation companies a good idea of which titles were worth pursuing commercially in the US.
Eventually, I think it would be reasonable (or at least unsurprising) for book publishers to object to such filesharing, once there is a strongly established eBook market. But I think it would be in their interests to just watch and wait for now.
What eBook filesharers could probably do to help this process along would be to break up large collections of eBooks currently being circulated into smaller units, e.g. by author, so the publishers can see a more clear value to the "market research" being generated. (Publishers might find it more convenient to see the data broken out by publisher, but I can't see anyone in the filesharing community going to the trouble of finding out who the current publisher/copyright holder of a work is, and anyway the correlation between authors and publishers is fairly strong.)
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