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>I don't understand why this is a movement that is ethical to get behind.

Because we broke copyright. There is room to quibble about exactly where and when, but the result is quite clear. The best summation I know of is from a speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay in the British House of Commons in 1841[1],

"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."

1. https://yarchive.net/macaulay/copyright.html

I use AA and buy books. Typically I may start a series on AA epubs then buy the books. Sometimes authors take money directly (patreon, straight donations, etc) which is how I would rather pay them than pay the publisher for them to only get a small cut.

Are libraries unethical to use? You can go to your library and read books without paying for them.

I just this week bought a book I first read from AA. Though I got it from a second hand bookshop, so I guess that was unethical, lol.

But you must understand you are a minority. Most people don't do this, they will get something for free and fiercely defend this right to get things for free.

Libraries aren't unethical, because they're just letting you borrow stock of books. There's practical limits on how it scales, and any impatient users might just buy the book. Once you can infinitely duplicate a work, it's not borrowing.

> Most people don't do this, they will get something for free and fiercely defend this right to get things for free.

So what? I think, if you read a good book, learn something or are well-entertained, it's a positive externality, so there is no problem with people doing it for free.

The only real issue with IP piracy is when someone gets money by copying the works. Which were originally the cases copyright tried to prevent.

Maybe you can clarify why you see people doing these things for free a problem, when there is a net benefit to society and also you.

If I didn't have a resource like AA I would likely read less and in the end spend less on books.

When people around me ask about how to "get into reading" I tell them to just find stuff they like online (via AA) or at the library and go from there. If you don't pay initially you don't feel as bad about trying things that may be "bad" or that you aren't interested in.

How do you know most people don't do this? All my e-book-reading friends buy physical and digital copies of books in addition to whatever they get off AA.

Half of the world lives on $300/mo. For majority of the world there's meaningful impact in saving $20 on a book.

> I would rather pay them than pay the publisher for them to only get a small cut.

Publishers aren't just stealing money that should go to authors. We can debate percentages and such, but buying a book also pays the editors (who any author will tell you are just as important to a book as they are), the typesetters, the designers, etc.

Obviously publishers provide some amount of value, but for a subset of the media I consume they are not great.

In the more indie fantasy scene authors often pay for editing themselves out of pocket. Often the only "publisher" they can get is direct publishing through Kindle, which then locks them into exclusivity with Kindle/Amazon. It's frankly disgusting but it's a way to help them get paid. I'd rather kick these people $20-50 directly than do anything else.

For academic books, which are after all a substantial part of Anna, the publishers aren’t usually paying the editors if the book is a collection of papers. The editors got paid by the grant funding for the project that produced the research.

Moreover, many respected academic publishers no longer provide proofreading or typesetting: they expect the authors or editors to commission their own proofreading, and the editors to just send in a PDF with camera-ready output.

For monographs, the “editor” that the publisher provides is only there to guide the author in producing their own camera-ready output, and does not actually do any work on the contents of the book. The publisher will hand off the manuscript to 1–2 peer reviewers, but those peer reviewers are unpaid.

the second part of your comment is weaker because libraries a) buy the book b) sometimes pay royalties per-checkout

Books worth buying usually have rabid followers who will buy them.

There's been a reasonable amount of research that suggests that piracy doesn't really cannibalise sales from those who can afford to pay.

But I do agree that for some of their categories a time wall would improve their optics.

I agree, but also you can't wait until something is out of print/unavailable to preserve it. Trying to prevent access to it or limit distribution will probably just result in it being lost media one day.

There's also the fact that just because a something is available to purchase in one country, doesn't mean it's available in other countries. A lot of movies/books/games/etc are geo-restricted in sale, with many countries having no valid methods to acquire them.

The best (but unrealistic) solution would be for people who can purchase legally to do so, while leaving it available for download for everyone else.

> I don't understand why this is a movement that is ethical to get behind. Someone spends months or years of their life dedicated to writing a book. And people celebrate the fact they can get it for free.

Academics have never really made any money off their published research, but rather are paid via their institutions or grants. The publishers make money, but academics themselves are aghast at the publishers taking their edited collections and monographs, doing no proofreading or even no typesetting (that obligation is often on the authors and editors now), and selling the book for hundreds of euro. That’s why authors will almost always send you the PDF for free if you email them.

The celebration is easy to understand if you are a researcher. Getting ahold of publications that your institution doesn’t hold or subscribe to is always a hassle, it really slows you down during the writing process. The shadow libraries turbocharge research. Over the last several years, shadow libraries have gone from a niche to something that pretty much everyone in my field uses daily.

Disallowing copying and sharing of art is a recent development in human history, not the norm.

The normal distribution of music and stories was for others to repeat them, and only recently have we decided it's illegal. I understand that things are different now, and people make a living off of art, but at the same time I find it difficult to care too much for someone who chose to make their hobby their job and refuses to adapt when things change.

Piracy never stopped the music industry, and the folks who were harmed the most by music piracy were the poor, cash-strapped billion-dollar corporations whose entire operating models already depended upon sucking wealth out of the actual, struggling artists who do all the work.

And it seems that piracy has become a net benefit to new and niche artists. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...)

I'd posit that the book industry will turn out to be the same. Piracy will harm the bottom line of the companies already at the top while giving exposure to the authors at the bottom. The latter being the ones who often strong-armed into terrible financial deals just to gain access to book-industry's four big gatekeepers, and who likely need that exposure to help keep a roof over their heads.

Anecdotally, I'm one of those folks who end up purchasing many of the books I pirate or otherwise obtain for free, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this.

You can't just start preservation "when the books are no longer for sale." It has to happen asap, there's no telling when something will get harder to find.

Personally, having to buy the barely-changed newest yearly edition of half a dozen $300 textbooks per semester of undergrad totally radicalized my view on copyright.