New York Times (free registration required)
talks about e-book pirates today: "While the music industry's effort to quash the trading of pirated songs over the Internet has attracted far more headlines, the unauthorized sharing of digitized books is proliferating in news groups, over peer-to-peer networks and in chat rooms."
Pirated e-books include best-steller titles like "The Da Vinci Code" and "The South Beach Diet." I actually remember summer last year, when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) came out, it took e-book pirates less than 24hours to deliver a properly scanned e-book in any format you can think of (txt, html, pdf, prc, lit).
Main sources for illegal e-books, the article continues, are peer-to-peer file sharing systems (emule), the IRC (#Bookz), and newsgroups (alt.books.*).
Welcome to the Digital Age.