eBook Piracy - Lessons learned

To the authors...  I'm looking for what you've learned in regards to eBook theft/piracy.  

• Do you know if there are currently any unauthorized listings of your eBooks?  (your product which people are downloading for free)
• If so, do you know the average number of these unauthorized listings are present?
• If these listings are present, do you know if your eBook is just one of hundreds in a certain download OR is your eBook title all on its own?  

I know many authors and have had conversations about this with them.  Some are not worried about your eBook being pirated and downloaded for free since they feel it's not a lost sale.  While diving deeper though, I found this is only the case if their eBook is part of a large collection of other eBooks in the specific download.

For example, people could search for "romantic vampire" novels and run into 1 download file which includes dozens or hundreds of eBooks all in one download.  In this case, I agree that the person who downloads this was not searching for your book itself and therefore, is not a lost sale.

On the other hand...  The majority of authors have told me they are in fact worried about their eBooks being available all the time for anyone to download for free if their eBook title is all on it's own (no other ebooks in that download).  In this case, since the person is searching specifically for your exact eBook title and nothing else, finds an illegal listing and downloads it...that is a direct lost sale.  There have been many studies which have proven that if a person searches for a specific eBook title, he/she would have went to amazon or elsewhere and purchased your eBook if they could not find any illegal listings of it to download for free.

I'm in the digital anti-piracy business and do run an eBook removal service, so this is where my curiosity comes into play. ;-)

Thanks for your time!