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Something to consider:
1. calibre is free. Every bit of it, including tech support. Not even Red Hat's "have this free software and buy a support contract" business model; just free.
2. Kovid Goyal, the developer in question, is making a living -- a meagre living, perhaps, but a living -- from calibre.
We're not talking about something people have the option of getting legally or illegally here. We're talking about something that people can totally legally, totally aboveboard, with a totally clear conscience, download, install, and use. And yet enough people click the "donate" button on the calibre website to keep Kovid from starving. This tends to argue against the idea that people would, given the choice of a legitimate book at a fair price, and an illicit book for free, choose exclusively based on price, not conscience. Calibre is free. It's GPL'd. It's both gratis and libre. Its market is not huge; think of how small the ebook market is, and then consider what fraction of that uses anything but whatever software came with their device. And yet people who have no obligation, legal or moral, to pay anything whatsoever for the software pitch in enough to keep the wolf from Kovid's door.
You say it takes just one person copying your book to totally destroy any hope of future income from writing. Might I point out two things: 1) The Harry Potter books were scanned and circulated from practically before their ink dried, and 2) J. K. Rowling is a billionaire. Maybe she's got a spell for that?
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