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Plenty of books I've tried to purchase epub or PDFs of only have Kindle rental versions.

If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.

And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.

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I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.

How is pirating books to read them by myself comparable to proactively selling other people's work?

Neither belonged to you in the first place.

And yet, one of these options is much more benign than the other.

nope.

Indeed, it is!

> without compenstion

A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.

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