[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.