Well, Amazon used to be ahead. I vividly remember using their "Find me this out-of-print book" service once and being very positively surprised that it actually worked. Signed up for the out-of-print book, got a message about 3 months later, and BANG, there it was, in my mailbox. That was one of the moment when I thought "well, they are really doing a great job" That has changed since, especially since the website design has been fucked up with ads everywhere.

Do you care about the quality of the typesetting? How well bound the book is? What paper was used? Etc.

No, you mean you don't care that the author gets paid.

It's not only about you.

(And I know DFW is dead, but he has an estate. And living authors have bills to pay.)

Do you care about the value of your purchase? If you spend, say, $150 on a scientific textbook, and then you cannot show it in public because you would look like a pirate, you should care.

And that is the best case of a readable, complete book. Maybe you get only the first 500 pages, or the figures are cut off, or it is a degraded scan of a printed book.

The problem is of course much worse for collectible books for which even getting an official reprint or a different edition instead of the real thing would be a problem.

Not silly, morally vacant.

Aside from the issue of the original author not receiving payment, counterfeit books can actually have textual errors as well. A few years ago when the 3rd edition of The Art Of Electronics was published, I saw quite a few warnings posted online not to buy from Amazon. These counterfeits were poorly printed and had many typographical errors, many of which made the information factually incorrect and caused that specific copy to be untrustworthy. So especially for a reference text like that, a counterfeit can actually cause harm if the information isn't correct.

Well, this illustrates the issue that many corporate entities have about open-sourcing their software code.

A book is a bunch of words, delivered to a reader via some medium. In order for a book to work, the words must all be delivered in readable format; whether printed out on a physical media, or delivered electronically, as text strings.

Because of that, copying the text is trivial. I have a scanner, under my desk, that will completely scan a book, if I unbind that book, and drop in the pages. I also have software that will OCR those scans. I have heard of OCR software that does a lot better than mine.

Writing a book is hard. I mean, really hard. I've done it. It can take months for an author to write a book that I can read in a couple of days (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey, or James Patterson).

Software is similar. Once it is written, reproducing it is trivial. After all, it's just a bunch of words. To make it even more convenient, almost all software is already rendered into electronic form.

With both of these, the only thing preventing anyone from simply copying the text, is the law, and there are lots of people (nations, even) that have absolutely no respect at all for the law. They will happily copy and reproduce the text.

It's entirely possible to have counterfeits of higher quality than the original. You could, for instance, sell a fancy, gilt-edged, leather-bound version of a book that has only been released as a mass-market paperback.

But what gives it real value, is the text.

You could steal software that drives a fairly humble Web site, and convert it to drive a megasite, or a design for a limited edition, artisanal product, and turn it into a cheap, mass-market knockoff.

In any of these cases, the originator of the text; whether an author, or a programmer, derives zero gain from it, and it can actually do damage to them, as the knockoffs could have real problems, and do brand damage, or the fake book could be published with the seal of the real publisher, and that publisher could see reputational damage, if the book contains textual errors (like lots of OCR'd books do).

It's a fairly big topic, and there are organizations that are dedicated to either freeing up artistic copyright, or overenforcing it.

The basic deal, is that, if you want art, you need to compensate the artist enough to make that art. AI might be at the point where that art could be faked, but I'm not sure if we are really there, or this is all a bunch of hype.