> "Buy or pirate" is a false dichotomy when there are good public and University libraries available; which is true for most big cities in the US. It's worth p

> "Buy or pirate" is a false dichotomy when there are good public and University libraries available; which is true for most big cities in the US. It's worth pointing out, that many of the book pirates are from outside the US. There are more than 500 million people in the EU, and the most up-to-date technical material has always been in English. Before Kindle was available, it used to take 3 weeks for the books from Amazon UK to arrive in my country, and almost half of the costs were shipping. Also, ten years ago, when this article was written, even senior software engineers in my EU country were making less than 1000€ / month after taxes, which made a 30-40€ book a luxury item. For a junior developer, a single technical book could have easily taken away 10% of his/her monthly salary. I expect something similar to still be the case in many parts of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Asia, which are developing regions with a lack of world-class universities and international libraries. For someone in Lviv, Ukraine, a city with 12 universities and 8 academies, where an average monthly salary is 350€, pirating a book might still be the only way to read it.