About seven years ago, I wasn't much of a reader. The occasions where I'd sit and read a novel were few and far between. I had a bookshelf full of technical books, but only a handful of non-technical books. Project Gutenberg and my Palm device changed that. I installed a free e-book reader (Weasel Reader, I believe), downloaded some classic texts from Gutenberg, and I was off to the races.
I didn't really know much about literature, though, so finding good stuff in the thousands of texts that are available at Gutenberg was a hit-and-miss process. H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley were fun to read, but I found Moby Dick painful. My interest started to wane.
A short time later, I came across a binary newsgroup for e-books where someone was in the process of uploading several hundred megabytes of books. Some of the texts were public domain, but most were scanned from copyrighted works. The collection leaned heavily toward science fiction, but there were thousands of authors represented and plenty of variety. I downloaded all of them and started my own collection. I started mainly with sci-fi and fantasy; I whipped through the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy in no time. After that, I tackled Arthur C. Clarke's "Odyssey" series, Roger Zelazney's "Amber" series, and Aasimov's "Foundation" series. It was great stuff.
Naturally, as I read more, my knowledge of, and interest in, literature grew. I started focusing on novels that have been earmarked as the best of the century, and I was able to pull quite a few of them out of the collection that I'd downloaded. I enjoyed titles like "Slaughterhouse Five", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "To Kill a Mockingbird", and anything by Hermann Hesse or Ernest Hemingway so much that reading started taking up more and more of my time.
At some point, it occurred to me that it would be nice to start building a library of the novels that I'd enjoyed the most. I started buying cheap paperbacks, but I quickly found that it was much nicer to have decent editions. Chapters became my favourite place to shop, and I logged a lot of hours browsing Amazon as well. Then one day I received a mailing from a company called "Folio". I'd never heard of them, but the full-colour brochure caught my attention right away. They had beautiful hard-cover editions of tonnes of classic books. Each book had it's own slip-cover. Naturally, these books weren't cheap, and the only way to get membership was to buy several of them. I splurged, though, and I haven't regretted it since. I always look forward to receiving their mailings for new books, and I've renewed my membership each year.
In no time at all, I filled two existing bookshelves in my living room. We added another book case, and it too became full. My reading started moving from classic novels to psychology and philosophy. I started buying the collected works of Carl Jung one at-a-time, and dove into Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It actually got to the point where I started giving away some of the books I'd bought earlier as I replaced them with nicer editions.
Several years later, I'm still reading every day. I split time between reading e-texts on my Palm and reading old-fashioned paper books. I have an impressive library, on which I've spent thousands of dollars.
My point is this: if it weren't for the pirated collection of e-texts that I downloaded several years ago, it's very unlikely that I'd have spent any of that money on books. I feel that authors would do well to get their works into the hands of the readers by any means possible.
The sales will follow.