https://i.imgur.com/0JhBBQi.jpg ^{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](https://duckduckgo.com) 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](http://www.lovebookvampire.com/science_fiction/Ready-Player-One/1.html), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Eve) by Hideaki Sena and [The Windup Girl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

Chat me up on Discord any time you want, I'm on the CryptoEmpire community's server: https://discord.gg/VQyYDnm

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