In a given year I read about 50 books. Mostly novels, but no one can survive on bread alone. At ~$20 each the cost would add up fast, except the vast majority of the books I read do not exist. They are real books that other real people have really read, yet their existence is tenuous. Like an inverted Schrodinger's cat, they are not real unless they are being read. I pirate my books. The text gets copied person to person, travelling machine to machine, transformed and ciphered by their journey in hopes of being decrypted by the right combination of algorithm, screen, and eyes.
Pragmatically, the books have to exist somewhere. Hardcopies exist in many places: as manuscripts, in libraries, on personal bookshelves. Digital files exist more tenuously. Original saved files and commercial e-books are defined by their heirarchy. Copyright law insists that all derivatives are copies, that despite being identical there is some uneffable originality that guarantees the content of the book can be traced back to a single source through a chain of command. Piracy contains no such guarantees. We share clandestine copies that intentionally contain changes, slight variations in formatting and packaging, with no owner or definitive source. Torrents depend on these distributed relations. Even downloaded, I know only where I can find my pirated files of books through a URL that points to them as they are shuffle through a virtual server. In theory I know where the server is, though only with the granularity of a meteorologist knowing the weather. My books are there-ish. I cannot give you a copy of them, I can only give you a map to find them yourself.
With some clever grammar and linguistic gymnastics the books I read aren't real and thus I don't have to pay for them, but that's clearly sophistry. So how does the whole scheme really work? Let's follow the money. The piracy site I frequent is technically free, which means it subsists on donated crypto and processing power. I rent a server for $30/yr (including domains and such) that maintains a few hundred torrents for the site; some are books I read, some are books that others want, and many are books that someone may want someday. We all collectively share the responsibility of keeping books from dissapearing, making sure nodes are reduntant in both content and interconnectivity. I read these books on an e-reader. A good used one runs about $60 depending on features and lasts me 3 years of hard use. All in, I spend about $50 a year to read as many books as I want
The other very real cost is time. Theft has a much better ROI than hard work. Someone still has to write the books and there is an entire economy that piracy outright bypasses. I am bandit putting not just authors out of business but everyone downstream. Editors, publishers, booksellers and resellers all going hungry as victims of my crimes. I would like to offer a secondary reading: of the initial $500 budget to read 50 books I have only spent $50 so far. The other $450 I free to spend how I please. At booksignings I can afford signed hardcovers as gifts for friends. In fact I do not have internet at home, so to download books I still head to the local bookstore cafe and lounge about with an expensive coffee like the other patrons. When I pirate dead people's literature I don't think twice about it, and when I find an incredible emerging author I can head to their website and pre-order their next book. If I truly love reading a book I'll hunt down a copy that exists to put it on my bookshelf. And when friends visit and see my physical, I can give them away knowing I still have another copy.