In some ways the games industry is actually worse than the film and music industries, while you don't have the games industry suing everyone who shares files some of the copy protection systems used that seem to go out of their way to prevent their paying from customers from playing the game are quite horrendous, especially since those pirating the game will have removed the copy protection anyway.
As far as simultaneous releases, I just don't see a gap between the hardback and the ebook versions being as big a deal with respect to piracy as you seem to be implying, its probably a much smaller influence on piracy compared with your other points about pricing and release dates between the uk and the states with those kind of things seeming all the more stupid when you are able to quite happily order the dead tree versions of books from abroad.
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