^{Image taken from Pixabay}

Reading books for free

Nowadays I read a couple books per week, but I barely earn more than 40 dollars a month, so I couldn't afford, among my many expenses, to spend 3-8 dollars a week buying books, especially when they're so easily accessible on the internet.

A quick search on Google or (my preferred tool) Duckduckgo brings me to dozens of results per book where I can, one click away, just download any format of any book I want. I can send them directly to my e-book reader or put them in my browser and read them online.

I'm reading this one right now: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I went to the movies yesterday and saw the live-action adaptation of this novel and I couldn't skip it. I'm now 65% in and I'll probably finish it tomorrow morning, and I have read a lot of books like that in the last couple weeks, the most notable being Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena and The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

The ethics of piracy in poverty

I once mentioned my fast-reading habits and my ease of mind while I looked for ways to freely access originally paid-for content to a friend, who told me not to publish such things in public. It creates a bad image, he said, and it is stealing, immoral and other bits of bashing that I don't remember. But the main point is that many would consider that I should instead not read these at all or that I should save for weeks until I could be comfortable hand down some coin to each of the authors whose content I consume.

Other legal ways would be trying to register at an online library and wait for my turn to read a piece... and... I can't think of any more ways except actually buying them.

I could've easily read more than 1000 books in all my life. My mum used to read to me, and when I learned to read, I was eating up books right up, reading whole collections. One of my earlier dig-ups from a library was a 21-book collection. We usually went to return the 3 books that I had just read and to retrieve the next 3 until I read them all. But now that I speak English and I want to read in the original language, there is nowhere to turn to other than the internet.

What do you think?

Should I just not read the books? Should I keep it the way I'm going? What do you think about piracy and the ways that we can get content when we aren't really able to pay it?

Leave me a comment below and a vote if you can afford it.

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