I will say that in my college classes, the first thing I always do is to download the PDFs of the recommended books to accompany the classes.

Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty).

Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages.

I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.

At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking.

I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.

Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy.

Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.

We need the equivalent of Z-Library or Sci-Hub for standards documents. It's a shakedown to pay $300 for a PDF of a public standard.

Annas Archive is even more popular these days, these shadow libraries often present a better user experience than many online bookstores as well.