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As others have said, there will need to be a viable ebook market and hence a good reader, before piracy has any significance.
Once we have those devices then piracy will help force reasonable business practices on publishers. If too much is being charged for ebooks, then people will pirate versions and will continue to do this until the price drops to a reasonable level for the market. It has been shown that pirating tends to make people buy more of a general product (numerous studies show this with music). So the issue isn't about piracy destroying profits, but it will dominate if ebooks are overpriced; bad pricing encourages a blackmarket to develop, which is essentially what piracy is. One thing I find quite interesting (and this is anecdotal, not scientific information) is that everyone I know who uses pirated software will go out and buy that software if they like it. It seems to me that most people understand the principle that a product should be paid for, but, more importantly, understand that not paying means not getting more similar products later. The self-interest in the latter helps ensure that people will still pay even if they can pirate books; though they might not pay for bad books--if anything this helps the market! Of course there will be some freeloaders, but numerous scientific studies show people generally dislike freeloaders I would think such an inherent dislike keeps down piracy levels.
As far as people making their own ebooks. I certainly plan on doing this for myself. I bought a high-speed scanner and if I remove the binding from a book I can rapidly scan an entire text. Current OCR software has greater than a 99% reliability--some higher than 99.9%. Furthermore, in an editable format the rare mistakes can be fixed. This sort of thing should help piracy stay healthy until businesses catch up to the market. Frankly, selling texts that restrict your ability to copy them, cut and paste info, and so forth is likely doing more harm than good since these functions are going to be desired.
Lastly, with PDFs and such I think there is a perfectly reasonable way to help diminishing pirating further. Information of the buyer can be encoded into the bought item. Something simple like having your name appear on every page would do a lot to discourage piracy from most people. It would be a lot better to work on things that make it hard to remove such information, rather than restricting the free use of purchased products.
-Drachasor
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