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It's not that hard to understand the appeal of pirated books:
1 - They are free
2 - No DRM
This is not important for some people, mainly Kindle owners who shop at Amazon, but for many others who have ePub readers, the process of registering the reader with Adobe, installing ADE, buying a book, receiving a link to it and opening it with ADE for downloading and transferring to the reader is enough to discourage them, not to mention the difficulties involved in buying a book at Amazon and reading it in an ePub reader.
3 - You can obtain books that are not available by legal means for whatever reason.
There are tons of books that have no e-version available and are out of print.
Sometimes you cannot even get them second-hand.
4 - You can have a look and decide if you're interested without paying
Of course you can have a look before you buy in some stores. In the case of Amazon, you see the cover, the title page, the table of contents and a couple of pages and that's all...
Some people also feel the need to find a moral justification for downloading without paying, but I believe that most "pirates" know that what they are doing is wrong, only they don't mind. Downloading a book for free doesn't feel like going into a book shop and stealing a book, even if you've been repeatedly treated to all those "You wouldn't steal a car" videos before you were allowed to watch the content you had paid for.
And not all "book pirates" are created equal. There are those who both buy and pirate books, depending on the ocasion.
Anyway, any survey including the annual income of "book pirates" sounds phony...
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