A recent study by the Swedish book publishers association discovered that 85 per cent of the best-selling books in Sweden are available on torrent site The Pirate Bay. This news nugget, reported over at Torrent Freak, predictably shows much more interest in the fact that the association might have used illegal methods to scan The Pirate Bay's database. But book piracy is a growing trend that many publishers and authors are keen to address, in a way that the music industry utterly failed to when mp3-swapping was first becoming popular.

Books don't lend themselves to being shared online in the same way that music does, for two main reasons. Firstly, people don't really like reading books while sitting at a computer and poring over a document on the screen. They're happy to pore over text on websites, sure, but that's a different kind of reading that requires bitesize chunks of attention. A book is going to take you a few days to get through – days you'd rather not be spending perched on a knackered office chair. And the notion of printing the whole lot out onto sheets of A4 would probably ring alarm bells in even the most non-ecological mind.

But, more importantly, you can't easily convert a book from your shelf into an uploadable document. You'd have to be hard at work with a scanner for hours, waiting for it to laboriously chug over each page, before opening up the documents and saving them in appropriate formats and manageable sizes. Certainly nowhere near as easy as ripping a CD. Of course, books are prepared in nice, neat, electronic formats before being sent to the printers, and it's that moment in the process where the risk of piracy is greatest – although it would, of course, have "inside job" stamped all over it.

The tipping point will come when the popularity of e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle really starts to take off, or when those long-predicted foldable screens are pulled out of commuters' bags en route to work. They'll be using books in electronic format, and while those documents will be strictly protected and prevented from being shared, you can bet that hackers will be hard at work trying to crack any digital rights management that has been implemented. Hence the panic from publishers and authors.

But some, including author Paulo Coelho, believe that giving books away in PDF format has boosted sales. We're heard this argument applied to music, and such claims are obviously impossible to quantify. But we could conduct a little straw poll here, by us all going to Coelho's site, downloading a book for free, and then seeing if you ask Santa for it for Christmas.

CONFUSED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY? SUBMIT YOUR QUERIES TO CYBERCLINIC USING THE COMMENT FORM BELOW, OR EMAIL QUESTIONS HERE.