You're belittling the work an author (without quote marks) must do to make knowledge accessible. You are not entitled to that effort, regardless of how easy it is to copy the end product.
This is the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution is simple: pay for it, or lose it.
Beyond that, thirty years of digital piracy have had a negligible effect on the industry as a whole, as with all other industries.
It is definitely not "small authors" pushing to close off what might be some of the greatest public sources of human knowledge in history, it's overwhelmingly the publishers, as they have catastrophized in every other field too.
Authors? Who goes to a live reading?
Lastly, you will not benefit from book piracy if you destroy an author's ability to survive by writing books. That's why I wrote: Tragedy of the Commons. I was careful to write about authors, not publishers. Pirating a self-published author is ethically wrong.