I agree there were all kinds of other considerations. The education required to write, and the cost of hand-copying books, meant that the market was nonexisten

I agree there were all kinds of other considerations. The education required to write, and the cost of hand-copying books, meant that the market was nonexistent and those who wrote anything worthwhile were intellectuals and had some other job or patronage. The cost of contacting most authors might've been impractical, even more than the cost of the scribes to copy books, even in cases where the authors were still alive. Still, there was a thriving intellectual culture, and nobody thought about this modern "moral right of the author" to extract rent from the transmission of knowledge. By modern standards, there's hardly anything more anti-copyright than forcing someone to let you copy their personal library. It disrespects not only the modern rent-extraction copyright by the author, but also the idea that written material in any form is anyone's property at all.