Just when the recording industry is getting comfortable with the idea of digital downloads for music, piracy and all, along comes a new breed of online copyright infringement: that of digital books.

Those fantastic eBook readers like the Kindle and that thing Sony wants us to like are a blessing for us bookworms, but it could be a headache for authors. As DRM is circumvented and copies of works make their way onto P2P networks, where will the royalties come from?

The problem isn’t that people want the content for free — indeed, libraries are still around — it’s that copyright law needs to be wholly overhauled to account for modern times. While there’s much buzz about doing just that, for now authors will just have to hope Amazon can out-market services like BitTorrent and make people pay.