Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I have a neighbor who only reads paperbacks. Yikes! Is she a pirate?  |
Does she steal new books from a bookstore? Theft and piracy would be appropriate terms. If she only stole used books from a vendor for which the author has already been paid, she would be a simple thief.
OTOH, if she purchases new or used books from a vendor, gets free paperbacks from a community source, etc., then she is, like the majority of us, just muddling along as best she can.
It may be a bit old fashioned of me but I do get some amusement out of the people who would never steal a CD or book from a store but think nothing of downloading illegal copies of the words and music from the Internet.
As when one acquaintance of many years passed away and his wife asked me to take a look at his computer to assess it's possible value. For some reason I was reminded of a scene from "
A Garden of Cucumbers" assessing the potential sales value of the St. Dismas Thriftshop: "About 5 thousand for the building and about 20 years for the contents". That quote is probably not totally correct since I read the book more decades ago then I care to think about. The computer was worth maybe $400, the contents of the hard drives were mostly very hard core porn images and videos.