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In a discussion on book piracy on Jim C. Hines blog he pointed out some things about library loans, including that libraries are a huge market for hardbacks, and they keep track of what's popular, so if an author's books are checked out often from libraries, that'll sell more of their next book, because libraries will pick it up.
Another thing is that in many countries (not the US, though), there are mechanisms that do pay authors for library loans, after a fashion. (In Germany per loan 3-4 cents are paid to an organisation which also gets fees for e.g. each scanner or photocopier sold. They pay their own overhead, and pay out the rest of the money to authors registered with them.)
Honestly, before that explanation, I saw no ethical difference between borrowing from the library and downloading a book to read it once (assuming that if you liked it enough to want to RE-read it, you'd buy a legit copy), but those arguments do make sense to me (what with actually having a library in my reach, even if their selection of English boks isn't anything to write home about).
There's also the thing that a pirated digital copy "dilutes" to way more reads book sold. Say, one book urchased by a library is read by 500 people (or does it fall apart earlier?), while a file created from one sale being able to be read by far more people.
And the problem that the digital copy stays in the possession of the person who downloaded it. If the situation is "paper books are more pleasant to read, but I'll read pirated ebooks on my computer for plus-size samples", there is additional motivation to get a legit copy in addition to "it's the decent thing to do/I really owe the author money because I enjoyed their work".
"I got an improved version of the retail ebook on my Kindle/Sony/whatever" leaves "only" the moral/ethical motivation, which is enough for some people, but not for some others.
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