A campaign is needed to educate the new wave of e-reader owners that downloading illegal ebooks from torrent sites is theft, amid signs that the piracy of books is increasing, authors claim.

Crime writer David Hewson, author of the Italy-set Nic Costa novels, said a campaign along the lines of "People Who Love Books Don't Steal Books" was urgently required – because readers who consider themselves his fans are downloading pirated copies of his ebooks and audiobooks.

Hewson's latest hardback The Fallen Angel was available online on torrent sites within a week of its publication in February. His agent, Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann, confirmed that "every day without fail" she receives Google alerts of pirated editions of her authors' work. "It's like a war on many fronts," she lamented.

Victoria Lustigman, spokesperson for the Publishers Association, said there were signs that copyright infringements of books, though not on the scale of those in music or film, "are on the increase". The PA has issued "thousands" of take-down notices to ISPs each year, she added, "with success in the majority".

Hewson, who said he has seen a "dramatic" increase in book piracy over the past year, argued that publishers and authors need to tell the readers with new devices they've been given for Christmas, "Authors do this for a living, and if you take their work for nothing you are depriving them of a living."

Novelist Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand and Little Bee, agreed. "I don't blame anyone. They don't do it [download books illegally] because they are evil but because they don't understand," he said. "In the music industry, when the price of music went down to zero – as it arguably now is because of filesharing - artists didn't mind that much. My music friends love it because they can make money through gigs and merchandising, they can put their faces on T-shirts. But I'm not a rock star and I don't have that as an option. If readers lose the habit of paying me for my work, I can't work. Writing is how I make my living."

Hewson is angry that the people who run the torrent sites – which charge users a subscription – are making money on the back of his work. "I spent a year of my life working on [each of] those books," he said. "They cost me time and money. Hosts of people at my publishers, people who also have the right to be paid for their work, were involved. What gives some thieving toe-rag the right to take all that work we've put in, steal it, then regurgitate it for the masses?" He added: "They are not Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor. I find it offensive."

Authors' incomes – never sizeable, except for a lucky minority – have been squeezed over the past two years, with the drop in publisher advances. Hewson said authors now face an erosion of their earnings from multiple directions, whether from the fact that library Public Lending Right doesn't cover the loans of ebooks and audiobooks, or the new practice of "Lendle-ing", joining ebook communities to take advantage of Amazon's US free loan facility on Kindle. "What we earn is being chipped away," he said. "I do know people who are thinking: 'Is it worth carrying on?'"

Chris Cleave said that the whole relationship between writers and readers needed to be redrawn, with writers responding creatively to the new formats. "We need to not be complacent as writers," he said. "These electronic formats could be used in much more creative ways, like e-books where authors are continually creating new content, a product that keeps evolving that gives readers a reason to buy."

