Well being an author, you’re entitled to royalties. It’s different for wage and commission workers. You keep getting paid as long as the books keep selling, but they only get paid once. It’s called capitalism, it’s an economic system in which control of the economy lies with the owners of capital. Capital is the means of production, the stuff people need in order to produce works of value. At a farm, capital is the soil and tools. At a mine, it’s the earth and machinery. At a factory, it’s the shipping contracts and the lathes.

At a book publisher, capital is the printers and presses, yes, but that’s not all. It’s also the abstract idea of intellectual property, which doesn’t actually exist on the physical plane. Intellectual property only exists in the law, it’s not a real material thing. Humans invented it. There’s no way a farm can produce more crops than the soil will grow. And no way a mine can produce more ore than what’s in the veins. But a computer can produce a million copies of a book for pennies in electricity costs. And I’ll prove that to you by pointing at social media, where a 10 megabyte video that lasts for twenty seconds is shared without a single thought, and the company makes up the cost of distribution on ads, which only cost pennies per view. A TXT of the entire works of Homer is less than 10 megabytes. And we use PDFs instead of TXTs, despite the massively increased size, because size just isn’t a relevant issue. It’s too cheap to bother worrying about, it doesn’t matter.

We didn’t have copyright before the invention of the printing press, because there was no point. Back then, if you wanted a thousand copies of a book, you sent a manuscript to a monastery and got the monks to copy it. And a thousand books would have cost a king’s ransom to produce. But when it became possible to copy intellectual works at low cost, publishing houses pressured the government to invent artificial scarcity in order to maintain profits. So that it would still be expensive for consumers to buy books, and publishers could pocket the gains from the printing press. And with the digital age, that fact is dialed up to 11. They’re laughing their way to the bank. The publishing industry isn’t in danger, they’re more profitable than ever. Technology made copying works easier, but e-books still cost the same amount as paperbacks. The profitability of publishing is at a record high. I want more people to use Libgen, so that their profitability goes back to what it was before the internet, and so that they have to get competitive again. When profitability is guaranteed by law, as in this case, companies start to ignore what’s good for customers and for workers like you. They don’t need to listen to anyone. You and I both want them in a weaker position, so that you can push them harder in negotiations and so that prices are better for us. Students are paying hundreds of dollars per semester for online copies of textbooks, it’s ridiculous. Tools like Libgen give ordinary people the power to break the laws that enable this power imbalance. That’s justice.