How to keep people from reading

[UltraBudgie]

It is stealing because it takes away the possibility of selling a book to the readers that download them.

But, from my experience, people that download books, songs and movies are not the kind of people that would have bought the book, song or movie if it wasn't free.

Okay then is that possibility real then which is why I was wondering if it is really stealing and I found this that is interesting although not the burn convention haha:
 

That is not to say, however, that property or copyright-defined-as-property in Jewish law resembles the “sole and despotic dominion” that William Blackstone famously presented as the mythic ideal of property.36 To the contrary, in some respects, the Jewish law and understanding of property deviate even more substantially from that ideal than does the common law. According to rabbinic tradition, indeed, the primary sin committed by the people of Sodom was to insist on the absolute primacy of property, declaring that “what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours,” and thus refusing to share or countenance another’s use of one’s property that benefits the user but causes no harm to the owner.37 Such spiteful, miserly behavior is regarded not merely as morally reprehensible; under certain circumstances, Jewish law affirmatively requires a property owner to allow another to benefit from using his property free of charge, so long as the property owner suffers no (other) loss from the use. Concomitantly, neither does Jewish law regard benefiting from another’s property without causing any loss to the owner as unjust enrichment.38

As applied by rabbinic jurists, the rule against acting like a Sodomite gives rise to three possible limitations on copyright, even assuming that copyright is property. First, if an author has created and disseminated his work with no intention of profiting from it, he might be acting like a Sodomite were he to insist upon payment after the fact.39 Second, the rule against Sodomite behavior supports the view of some rabbinic jurists that private copying is permitted so long as the copyist would not have otherwise purchased the copy and thus causes the author no loss.40 Third, the rule might be the basis for limiting copyright’s duration for published works.

(Page 250): From Maimonides to Microsoft: The Jewish Law of Copyright Since the Birth of Print

Which may be more moral I dunno but certainly worth considering other traditions maybe wisdom there.

I also wonder if its the book sales or the data that the big companies don't want to lose like if you offered amazon "hey we're gonna give your books away but we'll send you all that data on what people browse and search for and how many seconds they spend on each page and when they read on the pooper and what words they have to look up and what they search for after and everything you would collect from their kindles and you can use that data and sell it and train your ais to figure people out with it and everything we're just not gonna give you any cash per book anymore you can just have that data exclusive for free" I bet they'd take that deal in a heartbeat lol.