Trying to estimate interest in ebook piracy

When Attributor, purveyor of "the world’s first web-wide monitoring and enforcement platform," released "new research that examines the demand for pirated e-books across the Web and calculates how many people look for pirated e-book material on a daily basis," Eric Hellman, quite understandably, expressed some doubt about their numbers. When he conducted a test using Google AdWords, his skepticism only increased.

Hellman has a couple of posts about this, the first on Teleread and a second, longer and more detailed one, on his own blog. The second is the one worth looking at:

"As a result of this experiment, the Attributor numbers are even more inexplicable than before. It's worth noting however, the one area where there's no disagreement. Both my investigations and Attributor's show that consumer interest in piracy is mostly located outside the US, UK, and Canada."

The reason for that, he argues, has to do with rights restrictions around the globe, and he refers readers to this post by Jane Litte for a good discussion of how that works--or rather how it's not working.

Hellman also gives Teleread a nod for being "probably the longest running blog covering ebooks and related topics."

Jerry Pournelle, by the by, estimates that: "Ebooks are now about 10% of the entire publishing industry revenue, and the percentage is growing."