Publishers are going after eBook piracy in Europe. An international alliance of 17 publishers, which includes HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies and Oxford University Press, is taking legal against the operators of the websites library.nu and ifile.it.

Yesterday, the Irish-based operators of www.library.nu and www.ifile.it were served with court orders. In the complaint, the publishers claim that www.library.nu illegally acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted eBooks and made them available for free. In addition, the site owners allegedly earned more than $10 million in advertising from the site.

This may not be the first kind of attact on pirate sites. Tom Allen, president/CEO of Association of American Publishers stated: “For every rogue site that is taken down, there are hundreds more demanding similar effort.  I can’t think of a more timely example of the need for additional tools to expedite such action.”

Neither site is currently active. Library.nu currently redirects to Google Books.  Ifile.it has an error message that says “No upload servers currently available, try uploading at a later time.”