I wonder how many people do this and if it over inflates piracy figures or physical book readership
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.
(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 $$.