[atlasunshrugged]

Just a data point here but I am an aspiring author who negotiated with several university presses and ended up going with a small independent press instead and I strongly disagree on the audience you mentioned in your first paragraph. That may be the built in readership, but authors desperately want to reach larger audiences, even through academic presses, and often can exert little independent control over pricing. I would invert your assumption -- the authors that can afford to lose money from a shared copy are the ones published by the big five, many of whom received advances that their books won't pay back anyways, it's the authors published by academic presses and indie/nonprofit publishers that desperately need every dollar of revenue.

Trust me, I know books are expensive, they're probably my biggest line item after rent and food, but it really is meaningful for the publisher and author when you purchase a book.

edit: I also wanted to add that the publishing industry is decidedly low tech and a huge amount of assumptions about what gets chosen to be published is based on historical (mediocre, for a host of reasons) sales data via Bookscan, so when you don't purchase a book there also is is now one fewer piece of a demand signal that may lead another similar book to be greenlit.

[OfSanguineFire]

As I said, what I have read in just the last month from academic presses goes into the thousands of euro. No individual reader is realistically going to spend all that. And especially not when one is in Eastern Europe and makes a fairly typical living here.

Furthermore, I question your claim that me purchasing a scholar’s book would benefit hurting authors. At least within my own discipline (I’m an occasional researcher when a funded project comes along, and I have published on a number of occasions) authors do not materially benefit from publishing a monograph, getting an article into a collection, or serving as an editor of a collection. It’s all for prestige/career advancement alone. In fact, the PDFs on LibGen are sometimes surreptitiously uploaded by authors themselves, who have little love for the big academic publishers like Brill.

There are two cases in my own discipline where authors do care about sales. One is textbooks, and the other is a case where a group of scholars came together to found their own press so they wouldn’t have to deal with the big corporate publishers any more. But those do not form a significant part of my own reading.