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I then also grab the hardcopy at my earliest opportunity at a fair price. Legality aside, this assuages my moral desire to a) support authors and b) keep the print market viable //
In some jurisdictions there are general laws regarding format shifting. Such laws were intended to allow people to rip mp3s from CD and the like (for personal consumption of course). Indeed IIRC we in the UK are possibly going to be allowed to rip CDs and DVDs legally in the next couple of years (!).
What I think is that purchasing the book gives one a right to read it. Producing an ebook of the text for personal consumption should be fine and so by extension, IMO, there is nothing immoral about downloading the text of a book when one has paid to read that text. Indeed format shifting in books should be an allowed use.
Of course the actual ebook is going to have "company dress" and typesetting and what-have-you that's going to be protected by copyright. So one will probably need a service where you send your paperback, it gets the binding cut, is scanned and an ebook is made of the text. Of course then you can optimise by the company offering the service buying the paperback from the publisher for you, so you just get an ebook delivered with a receipt saying you bought the book.
And then the idiocy of this is apparent because a book is being created digitally only to be published and bound then scanned back to create a digital copy ... at this stage the publishers should assent to saving forests, ink, energy, water, etc., and allow the ebook to be sold at a reasonable price ...
[I've blogged to this effect before, http://alicious.com/on-ebook-copies-a-quick-opinion/]