The Publishers Association has said that downloading e-books illegally is becoming a big problem, and students are being named the worst culprits.
The online brand protection company, NetNames is also investigating the problem and has looked at the availabilty of 50 popular textbooks across five different training courses in the UK. They found that 76% of the titles were available to download free in pirated form on an e-book sharing site.
Publishers are trying to beat piracy by releasing their books faster and making them easily available.
According to NetNames, Science and Engeneering are the most pirated online academic books.