alt Hacker NewsThat doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.
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Textbook pricing is such a scam and often self serving at expense of poor students, I find the lack of support for buying them not at all surprising
Well, ethics is weaker, when the other is unethical in their own way.
400 euro for a book is hardly ethical. If you must charge that much for a copy you shouldn't have written it because you simply couldn't afford ro write it. Passin your poor business judgement onto others is not ethical.
These people tend to outgrow that tho. I def would have pirated books as a youth as it’d save me a trip to the library. Now i’m old and have money, I would never pirate a book as I value both contributing to the author and owning the physical thing. Maybe some exceptions if it’s in some niche tech or something and don’t wanna commit yet..
Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where book piracy is rampant than one where many people just don’t read anything?