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I think Charlie is bang-on in a lot of respects, and he provides one huge smack-to-the-side-of-the-head insight here: Most ebook pirates (both givers and receivers) are collectors rather than readers.
I must be getting senile, as I had forgotten that I saw this happen at the very dawn of the personal computer era, when CP/M ruled and 8" floppies were still mainstream. (I'm guessing 1978.) I knew a guy who bragged a lot about all the software he had. He showed it to me, and he really did have everything of any consequence, such that there was in the 70s. They were all bootlegs, of course, but that didn't matter. He had it all.
Why was this peculiar? His computer was broken. I'm far from sure it ever really completely worked. (He had soldered it together--chips-and-boards kits were common then.) He didn't run software. He connived copies from people, and let people copy from his collection, but he didn't run the software itself. He never even stuck it in his own disk drives. It was totally surreal.
I think the Usenet pirate groups are like that. The copies are often terrible, un-proofed OCRs. Many of the technical titles don't have all the technical figures and photos. I've seen copies of my own company's pbooks there and found that the copies were generally so painful that they were a sort of inadvertent advertising.
One point not made in the article is that there is no single place to look up or buy ebooks, like Amazon. I'd buy more ebooks than I do now if I could just find them, and most of the time they don't exist. It's true that most people won't buy ebooks that cost more than five or six bucks. The kicker is that probably half the ebooks I want to read are backlist or out-of-print stuff that will never see a legitimate ebook edition and thus can't be had at any price. And that's a terrible drag on the emerging ebook industry.
Overall, a superb article that everyone here should read.
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