> Or do you mean a system where people can steal what they want because 'reasons' and 'they want to pay less because xyz'?
So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered to purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity to read it, thus the author did not lose their sale.
The conversation will then turn to defending the existence of copyright as an incentivization to produce valuable works worth reading, and then to how the publishing industry eats those incentives anyway.
In the end, no one will exit the conversation having gained any insight.
> So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered to purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity to read it, thus the author did not lose their sale.
Given that I (as an European) pay extra fees for copyright management companies for each photography-enabled device, each memory device, each scanner and each printer, I should be enabled to make as many copies of any copyright-protected work as I want.
Which is incidentally how it works over here. What gets you in trouble is making works accessible to copiers, not owning copies.
Maybe they were an acceptable compromise in a time before e-books and e-readers, but they are neither fair to users, nor do they seem high enough to fairly compensate content creators without their normal revenue channels.
If the intention behind it is a kind of public subsidy for content creation: Sure, there are much worse things to spend tax money on.
But please do it properly then, i.e. something like a "public Spotify/Netflix" for books and films that correctly attributes view counts, rather than just handing money almost exclusively to already popular/financially stable creators as measured by past sales records.
> By the way, the answer to your questions is yes.
If it matters, I recently ordered 6 hardcovers from an author who's book that I downloaded from libgen was so impressively written, well sourced and thought provoking that I just had to put his best works (the book I "stole" by downloading, and 5 of his other works) in my physical library.
On the flipside, I recently wanted to read a book (different author) so badly but it wasn't available anywhere for less than $100 since it's out of print, so I downloaded it and don't feel bad at all. I haven't read that one yet, and if I love it I might spend the money for a physical copy, but it wouldn't matter since it's out of print and used and wouldn't make a difference to the author (also, he's dead).
So you copying one page from a book in a library would still lead to some form of compensation, although one could debate whether it is fair or not, whereas using a P2P search engine to locate an online copy of a PDF would not.
Also, IMHO, the discussion of such online libraries should separate the topic of fair compensation of authors (I believe Norway or Finnland have "author stipends" paid by the government that one can apply) and the topic of locating and researching whether a book is what one needs or to one's liking.