[jamesbeat]

I don't agree that pirated books are necessarily lower quality than paid-for ones.
I think that there is a large legacy collection of books that have been scanned and distributed for a long time, lots of them were around long before ereaders even existed, and these books are definitely of varying quality.

Now there are books that have been released by publishers and had the DRM stripped.

I think it's a false assumption to think that a pirate will scan and OCR a book that is already available to buy as an ebook, so providing the book has been released in electronic form, the pirated and genuine versions will most likely be identical.

This is similar to what happened with music.
If you downloaded music over five or so years ago, you'd get all sorts of garbage. Weird bitrates, tracks all merged into one mp3 file, not properly normalized, even some recorded from vinyl.
Proper tags? Forget it.

Since ipods and itunes (and their competitors) have soared in poularity, the pirated music has soared in quality and uniformity, and as nobody downloads the amateur stuff any more, it disappears from the torrent sites.
When I moved over to mp3 from CD, I did it the smart way. Instead of ripping my 300+ collection of disks, I searched for them all on P2P and left my computer turned on for a couple of nights.
Definitely a legal grey area, but I didn't worry too much because I owned all the original CD's that i downloaded.

the point I am attempting to make is that as ereaders continue to become even more popular, the quality of the illegal downloads will rise, because there will be more professionally produced material available.

As to the older books that maybe will never be released in ebook form by publishers, well a badly made scan is better than no scan at all, and the poor quality ones can be edited yourself if you have the time and inclination.
That's why some downloaded books have a version number.

My experience of darknet books has been downloading books that either I already have the paper version or the book is out of print.

Sometimes torrents are the only way to obtain out of print stuff, except of course trawling used book stores or ebay for a 30 year old paper version that stinks and is disintegrating.

Buying used books does not put any money in the author's pocket, and as for the publisher, if they wanted money for the book, they should print it or release it as an ebook I can buy.