It was of course only a matter of time until e-books hit the same problems as have previously vexed the music and movie industry. That problem is of course piracy, illegally making copywrited works available free of cost as well as free of the digital rights management or DRM that kept them tied to one device or another.

Of course the music and movie industries have been to great lengths to stop and try to prosecute offenders mainly to little or no effect.

Now publishers and retailers of e-books have even bigger problems. Publishers and retailers for the Kindle e-book as well as the iPad and Nook need to look carefully at the main problems that they face in stemming the tide of pirated e-books; these are the DRM and file size.

In view of the sheer number of e-books available on pirate or torrent download sites it seems quiet clear that the DRM is very easy to remove from any e-book. Once the DRM is removed it is possible to read the e-book with any number of devices as well as on your PC as a PDF file.

The other major problem is the file size. The file size of an e-book is much smaller than a music file and is considerable smaller that a movie file. This means that it would take the same amount of time to download 600 books as to download one movie.

Currently the most popular download on one torrent site is a collection of 650 files for the Kindle e-book. This file is less than 1GB in total so can easily be stored on a usb drive, taken on holiday and of course be passed to someone else very easily.

E-book publishers and retailers had better hope that most of their customers will go the direct and easy route of buying the book from their official sites rather than going to illegal download sites as it would seem that there is little to be done to stop this.