> they are sharing a digital copy of your book as a data-file, which is very quite different from a real book. You cant hold it you see, you cant smell it, you cant borrow it to your friend, only make another copy.

You can read it, yes?

I'm among the first to complain when people conflate "make a digital copy of" and "steal". However, you're going to the opposite extreme - pretending that because it's digital, it has none of the qualities of the original book. You're omitting quite a bit - he (and perhaps his editor) wrote every word in it, chose every image, researched the technology, and typeset the whole thing. Just because it ended up as both a PDF and a printed copy does not diminish the author's labor.

(It certainly diminishes the printer's labor, which is why we raise a stink when printed copies are cheaper than electronic ones.)

But you're hurting the entire ecosystem if you tell authors "stop writing if you don't like it". There's a middle ground somewhere.