Comment by TFNA

That doesn't accord with my experience. I've been involved in academic book piracy since the early millennium, and there definitely was no "buy it if you like it" ideal. Virtually no one will spend the 100-400€ that a typical scholarly book costs except libraries. And since this was a community that reads heavily outside their research as well, once works of fiction started to be more heavily hosted on these servers, it came to seem a waste to ever actually spend money on media if you could just read it all for free -- nevermind that a lot of users were in the former USSR or the Third World where media was not available for sale locally even if you wanted to spend the money.