Stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'.

Piracy is a violent penal crime that often results in murder and property theft. Copyright infringement we are talking about is just copying digits.

I agree that funding for otherwise unknown authors is necessary for high quality books, and I agree that more sales mean more money around to fund "risky" authors.

But I'd rather see funding work a bit like science, where you ask a non-profit for funding based on a project proposal that's judged more on its merits than on its sales potential. No author would need an "X Twitter followers" pre-requisite anymore.

And then there's the counterpart, namely, reach: when I studied Japanese in South America the only textbook available in Spanish were photocopies sold (illegally, of course) by the University of the only original they had - with such a small market and highly devaluated currency, no bookstore imported the book anymore. Had it not been for piracy, none of us could have studied. And it would have been poor consolation to know that our sacrifice in not pirating a book would have led to better books somewhere else that we also wouldn't be able to afford.

Given that any book can now be preserved and reproduced indefinitely, and given that there's only so much reading one man can do in his life, shouldn't there be a point when we have enough books and don't need any new ones? We might have reached that point already.

> Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free.

I would argue this is more or less already the case.

> Purchase books. Please.

The people who download lots of books illegally are often also the biggest buyers of books.