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First off: I don't really believe in copyright, not as it all stands and for personal use and stuff. I guess I don't believe in profiting from the hoarding of intellectual wealth.
Having said that, if you do believe in copyright, as it's currently practised, then I feel this is very clear cut: pirating a book is still pirating a book in just the same sense, even if it's out of print.
If you think it's wrong to pirate an ebook that you could buy from Amazon, then it's just as wrong to pirate an ebook of something that's out of print.
Why? Because that out-of-print book is still available on the second-hand market. You can buy a secondhand copy from Amazon's secondhand sellers or from AbeBooks or from eBay. And the law of supply and demand shows that when you do so you slightly raise the secondhand prices for that title. If the publisher sees the secondhand price rising, then they'll reprint it - if it rises enough this will be irresistible to the publisher.
I see lots of comments here about publishers being "too lazy" or "not being interested" in republishing their back-catalogues, but in pirating an out-of-print book you're depriving them of the financial incentive to reprint it, too. So if you just pirate the book, the publisher is deprived of you as a potential customer. Just buy the second-hand copy! What's so hard about that?
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