Software piracy rates by nation can be seen here:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cr...re-piracy-rate
There is a HUGE difference with the US only having 20% pirated compared to Armenia with 93%.
It appears likely that eBooks have approximately the same divergence of piracy by nation. Songs and movies probably also have the same divergence. The Netherlands shows 28%. Russia shows 73%, Germany shows 27%, UK shows 26% and Japan 23%.
Every culture has different norms. We should not criticize citizens of the Netherlands for their own cultural norms on eBooks. We are all different.
I have a hunch that even inside the US there are wide variations of norms for paying or pirating eBooks. For some it is a challenge to use Calibre and Alf to pirate eBooks and then redistribute them via torrent or other sites or between large groups of friends and families. Those folks try to accumulate huge libraries and then pick a book to actually read. Others like me do NOT accumulate large libraries and only buy a book to read directly from Amazon. We rely on Amazon holding the large library for us.
For some paying $ 10 for an eBook is just an irrelevant fee. For others it is a devastating expense.
Breaking DRM does force down prices over the long term. It used to cost $ 30 to buy a CD with 20 songs just to listen to ONE song. Now Amazon sells the individual songs for just $ 1.00 without any DRM at all.
The consequence is that rights holders see their revenue plunge. Some authors now are even bypassing publishers altogether and just selling direct through Amazon.