Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:
1) The product they want — electronic texts — are hard to find, and thus valuable.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.
Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.
And...
Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called "online piracy," it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

The main reason people swipe books — or do the equivalent, like buying a paperback with a stripped cover that they probably know is not a legitimate copy — is simply because they can't find a legal copy. Not, at least, for anything they consider a reasonable price or in a format they find acceptable. But if they could, they would, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
On a cold-blooded economic level, it is the understanding I've laid out above that always guided Jim Baen from the beginning of the electronic publishing era. Jim always understood all this. (In fact, I learned a lot of myself from watching him and talking to him.)
From the beginning, Baen Books has always consistently followed a course of action that is diametrically opposed to the one advocated by DRM enthusiasts.
Baen's policy can be summed up using the same three points I enumerated above:
1) Electronic editions of Baen's titles are not rare. In fact, they're almost ubiquitous. With less than a handful of exceptions — those usually involve contractual restrictions on electronic publication insisted on by a few estates — all Baen titles will be produced in an electronic edition as well as a paper edition.
2) The books are priced cheaply. Where most publishers insist on selling ebooks at a higher price than paperbacks, Baen sells them at a lower price — and a much lower price if you take advantage of their monthly Webscription service. You can buy a Baen title in electronic format for as little as $2.50 — and almost no title is priced higher than $5.
3) Finally, the books are designed to be as user-friendly as possible. Baen will provide the text in any one of five popular formats, some of which are completely unencrypted. No restrictions are placed on the customer's use of the book thereafter. They can do whatever they want with it, just as they can with a paper book.
Given all that, who is going to bother to steal a Baen title? How many people with enough intelligence to read a book in the first place are going to go through the time and effort to find a pirated edition of something that they could have obtained legally — very easily and quickly, at a stable and well-known web site — for five dollars or less? An edition, furthermore, which has been professionally prepared and doesn't carry the same sort of frequent OCR-scanning errors that most pirated editions do?