Interesting O.P. and subsequent comments. Everything from not paying for it is always wrong (even for out of print books not available through any legitimate source in ebook) to if I can find it anywhere for free anywhere it's mine (even for books available in ebook at reasonable pricing). The latter sort of makes me nostalgic for the ethos of the 'hippie' culture of my youth: “things should just be free man.”

I am actually in the same fix at the moment. I want three books, all first published over fifty years ago, in ebook format. However, after much searching it appears that none have been legitimately released as ebooks and so it is impossible to buy any of these. If I could find any of these titles on the 'darknet' would I download them? I'll admit I probably would. Since I don't have any idea of how to access the 'darknet' what I will actually do is buy the cheapest paperbacks I can find, cut the binding off, and scan them myself to ultimately produce an epub book. This is something I only do as a last resort for a book I really want due to the time involved.