If you and I would support the works we think are good, why wouldn't others? I keep noticing that people constantly expect worse morals from others than how they claim they are themselves

It's easy to add a "me too" onto the existing list but that's not my point. I think we generally can expect better from the average person than we instinctively do. If 50% of people are just as honest as we are (if we're average persons which, on average, we are), that would be easily worth it if free distribution of a book gets you a 3x bigger reach as compared to when people have to pay up front. I'm not aware of research confirming or refuting this (of course I'd like to believe that information can be free), but it doesn't seem so outlandish to me that we can ignore the option altogether by doing a sniff test