[effie]

Not at all. The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work. The buyer is responsible for paying the author. If the author can't hack it and get buyers(often the buyer in this sense is the distributor), then the author should find a different occupation.

[massinstall]

> The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work.

What a convenient way to make oneself feel comfortable living a moral-free life. Like as if this changes anything for the end result that someone stole something, and someone else has to foot the bill for that. You’re arguing off the premise that „the distributor is big anyway, so stealing from them doesn’t hurt anyone”. And the premise that it won’t hurt the author. It appears worthy of consideration that there may be a lack of fantasy here on your part.

[effie]

Oh, the moral card. Morals are highly context-dependent and vary across the population and social classes. There is no consensus on the idea "reading books without paying for them is immoral". It may be - if the person reads all books by some author, can afford to pay, but never does, then it does smell like bad behaviour. But not everybody behaves like this.

Most books I download and read are some scholarly or technical stuff, where I read maybe one or two pages that interest me and then never open the book again for a year.

I could never get all the books from stone-walled library or buy them all. But fortunately I do not have to, they are all available in the Public Library called the Web, and using this is beneficial to me, and harmless to anybody else.