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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
I think you have that backwards. Pirated ebooks tend to be the same as retail, stripped of DRM and uploaded.
There are fan scans of older books that haven't gotten an ebook release as yet.
e-books suffer from the 'geo stupidity' of "you can't get it legally in your country, period." Try searching Amazon US for Kindle versions of Michael Moorcock's Elric books for instance. They are available at Amazon UK.
A literary horror novel I want to read, The Town That Forgot How to Breathe is available cheaply in the UK, but not available at all in the USA or Canada (and the author is Canadian).
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The first two or three Harry Potter books were available in the UK 6 months before they were available in the US.
There are two very different things going on with "pirate" ebooks. First, we have what I call pirate ebooks, i.e. someone selling eBooks that they are not authorized to sell and pocketing. Then you have fan scans that are frequently available for free download.
I have no experience with the pirate sites, but fan scans can range from excellent quality to terrible. A lot depends on how many people are interested enough in the book to take the existing scan, make corrections and upload the result. It's not much different that Gutenberg, except of course that Gutenberg does it for books out of copyright and fan scan tend to do it with books in copyright.
My personal take on pirate sites, ignoring the ethical questions, is why would you give your financial information to someone you know is a thief? Is saving a couple of bucks really worth the risk?