An unidentified number of university presses and other publishers have banded together to monitor book piracy--discovering that pre-release digital copies of books are available on file sharing sites.

Daphne Ireland, Princeton University Press' IP director, told Inside Higher Ed that she had hundreds of books removed from file sharing sites last year. Nearly "a half dozen" of those titles were e-book galleys. As GalleyCat reported last year, digital copies of 85 percent of Swedish bestsellers are already accessible on illegal download sites.

Here's more from the article: "The Association of American Publishers has helped a group of publishers jointly support the monitoring of pirate Web sites to identify violations. Edward McCoyd, who leads the effort for the association, said that while he did not want to release a list of members, university presses are involved. 'We've found quite a bit of activity, including books from university presses,' he said. At this point, the pirate sites are going after 'every sector of publishing.'" (Via Utpress)