Most of my purchases are from Weightless Books [1] which sells only DRM free books and magazines.
Granted, this is a limited and small market (SF related stuff) but if I have a choice of getting a book DRM free from a vendor or getting it from Amazon, I would avoid Amazon, even if its price was cheaper.
This severely limits what ebooks one can read. I used to torrent DRM-free epubs and buy the paper copy so I could support the work without appearing to support DRM. Lately though I've been skipping the torrent part and just buying the paper books.
(this may not apply that much to books but most types of content are usually filled with DRM garbage, region restrictions, usually have worse quality and distribution methods, and they pretend to not understand why people choose to pirate it)
Streaming video piracy sites are becoming more popular than downloading, and that's usually poorer quality and worse interfaces than the official sources.
These people wouldn't pay no matter what you do so it's not really relevant. I'm talking about people who resort to piracy because they can't pay to get what they want. Or the value just isn't justifiable.
For example, I feel cheated when I have to wait months for content to be available in my country. Sometimes years (or not ever). So I go and download some torrent since I can't buy the content anyway. And now I'm one of the numbers on their spreadsheets.
If licensing is broken or too hard to manage, they should spent the money fixing that instead of going after "pirates".
I purchase out-of-print paper books, but I would really like to get out of the dead-tree-storage business.
A couple of years ago we donated most of our 3000 books to our school. I still have boxes, though. Mostly textbooks, because textbook sales terms have become even more exorbitant than when we were students.
I would gladly pay for eBook copies of the novels I own and enjoy. Many are simply not for sale.
And textbook market is getting weird: either $200 each, or open courseware for little or no $$.
I used to think DRM by Amazon was a kind of wink-wink nudge-nudge, we pretend to do DRM but we don't really. But then they went serious about it, and so I left the platform.
Amazon should have an DRM-free option or fingerprinting option for publishers. I am not sure if it does. I believe some publishers would be fine with fingerprinting, since that is what they do on their own sites when you buy a PDF (Springer is one). All the Gutenberg books on Amazon are DRM-free I believe, and it's just more convenient to get them there if you have a kindle and have a significant collection of eBooks from the last few years.
Why? Just because of DRM?
It's philosophical for me. Yes, I could buy a DRM book and then strip the DRM but that is self-defeating in the long run, in my opinion.
By refusing to buy DRM books from Amazon and choosing to buy from non-DRM providers instead, I'm sending a message as a consumer about my DRM preferences. I'm also trying to support the non-DRM providers by keeping them in business.
Buying DRM books from Amazon, then stripping it away quietly only signals that you don't mind DRM and discourages other people from directly providing non-DRM options.