Illegal piracy of books is NOT like a library.
Theft of books digitally is in no way the same thing as a library. The number of people who have to drive to the library and check out a physical book one at a time is not even remotely comparable to the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who can download the digital copy of a book from the comfort of their homes from a pirate site.
Every single one of those thefts negatively impacts the hundreds of hours that I spent writing and editing that book. I am not a millionaire. I am a writer who sweats every word out after she works a full-time day job. I am a writer trying to build an audience and maybe, one day, get to write full time. Every single sale matters to me. If you respect me as a person, as a writer, you will not steal my book. Period.
^An author’s perspective on the library/file-sharing comparison. At the end of the day, people who create things DO deserve to be paid for their work. Although I can get books digitally from my library, I’m sure that (completely legal) service is used a lot less often than pirating websites.
This goes for music, too! I am a musician and when I pour out my heart to record a song, I’m doing my job. I wouldn’t come into a coffee shop and steal tips and scratch hours off someone’s time sheet, so I don’t want people to do that to my fellow musicians.
(And a note about libraries with ebooks—they buy the licenses from the publisher of the book and each ebook can only be lent to a certain number of people at any time… so yes, authors do get paid through that)
