e.g.
“Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.”
and
“You have a pirated MP3 collection,” Jo added, helpfully. “We copied the first 1500 songs from one place and 300 from another.”
“Yes,” admitted Ragbe. “There were a lot of things on the iPod.”
I feel that lumping handbags in here is wrong. There's probably a trademark infringement as well with the handbags. But, whilst there is copyright infringement in the design does the design have an artistic quality or is it "just" a design. The fact that there is a skill and materials expense in producing the handbags gives it a different quality IMO.
The important part with the handbags is the infringement of the Prada trademark whilst with the books and music it is the copyright infringement.
A fashion designer would probably disagree?
Music piracy is similar. Piracy works right now because there are enough people buying music and the margins are high enough that those legitimate buyers are supporting the pirates. Only at the point that creating music is unprofitable will piracy be affected (no more fish in the sea). I don't see that happening for a long time.
There are some devout pirates who simply will not buy, but I suspect they would not buy even if they had another option — these are the people who would tape songs off the radio and copy their friends' CDs. They're either people who just refuse to pay for things or too poor to pay for things. But you can't generalize this to "pirates."
Many (most) musicians/artists create music/art for the love of it. They make very little if any money doing it. Often, they even do it at a loss.
It has been this way since long, long before the internet and filesharing existed.
That said, authors and artists like the lady in the article are hurting themselves when they choose not to make their works available to people in the format they want, especially when it is very easy to convert those works into different formats, or at least easy enough that people are willing to do it.
One consequence, it seems, would be that a work would enter public domain as soon as the creator dies, since the only remaining resource (the digital work) is unlimited.