I recommend buying actual books from local bookstores (bookshop.org can middleman) and then giving them away to a local library when you're finished with them.
Piracy is for children.
Piracy is for children.
I wrote a historical novel last year that I self-published on Amazon, on paper as well as Kindle. To my surprise, 80% of my sales are paper. It's in French, and the French are notoriously conservative, but still...
I don't care one way or the other what other people do, but for me the only time I buy paper books is if there is no electronic version, or the ebook is priced something like €15 and it's possible to find a used copy for 50 cents.
I understand some of those are hand-waived away on a Hacker Forum full of technologists, but they describe the uncanny valley of e-book reading for many book readers. Your novel's statistics don't surprise me!
Ignoring peoples' concerns and writing them off with a pejorative is for children.
If the highly paid adult readers of Hacker News are pirating artists' creative works, and take offense to me pointing out that piracy is for developing brains who can't afford things, then it's a conversation they need to have with themselves, not me.
Being unable to process the argumentative positions of other human beings and factor those in to your responses when interacting with other human beings is a behavior exhibited by developing brains that can't grasp basic adult communication.