Well, my friend, he's kinda poor he can't afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don't understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn't like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it's the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn't pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let's all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
This, the difficulty of simply paying for the things you want. I used to pirate music back in the IRC/pre-Napster days, and then iTunes came out. "I can just click a button and the song is on my computer, high quality, no fuss?" That was the end of music pirating for me.
I have Amazon Prime and I've tried Netflix in the past. The amount of time I spent sorting through their shit movies to find something worth watching was abysmal, not to mention no way to filter out the huge influx of low-budget non-English content.
Difficulty paying for the things speaks to me. I have musical tastes, esp. in bootleg remixes, such that there is no way to legally buy many of the tracks and CD length megamixes I like.
I actually want to pay for these things but there's not really a way to do that.