ebook availability or not, the book will be pirated. In countries like Russia or even
India , they wouldn't care and a pirate version will surface. Maybe it would not surface as quickly. ebooks sales from those countries are miniscule, if any, anyway...
But at least those of us, who want a properly formatted legal copy could get one. And with the DMCA and US copyright laws so strict, most people would just spring $30 than risk jailtime. Currently, law-abiding people who want to carry the book around on their PDA/Laptop/etc have to either OCR the book themselves or download an illegal copy, guess which route most people would take... As far as I know, most people will prefer the legal route if there is a 'painless' way...as Apple's iTunes store has proved... sure P2P is still thriving, but many of those using those networks would probably would not (or does not have the resources to) buy them anyway...