The Hachette Book Group has hired anti-piracy protection service Attributor to help it monitor the web for illegal use of its content. As Jim Milliot reports in a Publishers Weekly story, “Attributor’s Web-crawling tool checks a variety of sites, including document hosting sites, and social media and social networking sites for unauthorized posts drawn from Hachette’s books.”

Milliot says that according to Hachette CEO David Young, “the publisher’s legal team is spending an increasing amount of time checking sites for pirated content, [and] it became clear the company needed to ‘automate and augment our monitoring,’ as the number of illegal postings spread.”

Attributor has been working with news organizations such as the Associated Press, but this is its first deal with a book publisher. But word that the company “has been testing software that can track content held in pdf files, something that has become a major problem for book publishers,” is making Attributor hot, and company head Rich Pearson says “Deals with other book publishers are in the works.”