[altxwally]

I was a big fan of library.nu. As a student in Mexico, you just cannot get some of the books that were available in there, so it was incredibly useful. I no longer used the site so much, but I'm still grateful that this site was live when I went to university. It kind of marvels me how artificial are the limits that humans put on knowledge that can be useful to others, I hope we can solve this problem someday.

[xtracto]

Not completely true. It is trivial to buy dead-tree books from Amazon.com (US) and send them to Mexico (books do not pay taxes when entering Mexico). I have done it for more than 10 years.

The real problem is the cost. Imagine that, if people in the USA, earning it US dollars think that a text-book (http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Management-14th-Philip-Kotle...) costing USDd$168.72 is crazy. Imagine what people in Mexico (where the average yearly income is about USD$7,300) , India, China or other development countries think.

Quite simply, a lot of the people who pirate books are not a market for the publishers simply because it is impossible to pay.

Are they entitled to get such knowledge for free? legally, they are not. Morally... it is subjective.