43 Million Books and the Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Quick question: have you ever pirated a book? I'm not judging. I'm just asking.

On Tuesday, thirteen publishers — including all the Big Five, plus Elsevier, Wiley, Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Cengage — filed a joint lawsuit against WeLib, a platform that allegedly hosted over 43 million books and 98 million academic papers, with 80,000 active monthly users. The CEO of the Association of American Publishers declared that WeLib “steals, distributes, and profits from millions of literary works.” A lighthouse asking the ocean to stop.

What makes this case interesting — beyond the astronomical numbers — is what it reveals about the fracture between knowledge distribution models and the way people actually read. WeLib operated on a tiered donation model: free with a waiting list, or between $7 and $90 per month for unlimited access. This isn't a teenager pirating PDFs from their bedroom. This is infrastructure.

Borges imagined a Library of Babel where every possible book already exists. WeLib was building it — but with real books, without paying anyone, copying the source code of Anna’s Archive, which already lost its own legal battle. The question that no press release asks is: what happened before WeLib? How did we get to a world where 80,000 people a month seek an illegal alternative to read?

I'm not defending piracy. I'm defending the question. Academic books cost $200. Novels, $25. Copyrights expire, but distributors keep charging anyway. If there were a fair and accessible distribution system, WeLib wouldn't exist. Piracy is not the disease: it's the symptom that something in the publishing ecosystem is deeply broken.

Publishers won against Anna’s Archive in the same court. They'll probably win here too. And when they do, another platform will appear. What would you do if the book you need doesn't exist in any public library in your city and costs more than you have?