I looked up the price for Project Hail Mary which I read recently, it's like $20 and the physical book is the same price. Think about that. Imagine all the work involved in producing and transporting the physical book, compared to just infinitely copying a single epub file that's probably generated automatically from a word document or whatever they use to write books. The fact that those are the same price is outrageous. It's completely unreasonable.

I wouldn't say I'm cheap, I'd say I'm frugal. I'll happily spend money on things, just not when I don't need to. And especially not when it's completely unreasonable like ebook prices. I can get it for free so I'll take that deal. You can say it's parasitical, I guess I don't disagree with that. Personally I think there's a lot bigger fish to fry in that department like insanely rich people who hardly pay any taxes, but sure I'm slightly parasitical in some minor and insignificant(to everyone except me) ways.

I also don't really think it matters that much. Most authors don't make enough money to live off it. The ones who do, make a fortune. I generally read books written by those lucky few who make a fortune, and I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about not paying money to Andy Weir, who's worth about $55 million according to a quick Google search. He'll be fine. And all the middle men like Amazon and publishers etc can pound sand as far as I'm concerned.

Oh yeah because I definitely want to be giving money to entitled shits who'll spit in my food. That makes all the sense. Tipping happens after anyway.

And for the record I'm not American, we don't have the insane tipping culture you guys do. I know you're American because only an American would say what you just did.