Your don’t have a right to read any book

I’ve followed this week’s debate on the merits and justifications for piracy, and it is probably one of the more balanced arguments Nigerian Twitter has had in a while.

There were good points everywhere. Some people argued that piracy is plainly wrong because authors already earn very little from royalties. Others conceded that piracy is technically wrong but defended it as understandable when readers simply cannot afford the books they want to read. A few insisted that piracy is not morally wrong at all, especially in countries where exchange rates make books prohibitively expensive.

And then there was the take that seemed to provoke the most anger.

Someone said something along the lines of: if you cannot afford a book, maybe you should not read it.

Predictably, people were furious.

It is easy to see why that statement feels offensive. Reading is widely treated as an unqualified good. Books are supposed to be instruments of enlightenment, education, imagination, and civic participation. To suggest that access to them should be restricted by ability to pay sounds, at first glance, like arguing that people should be priced out of knowledge.

But the outrage also reveals something slightly confused about how we talk about books.

The arguments consistently oscillate between two different ideas.

The first claim is that reading is good for individuals and societies. That is difficult to dispute. Literate societies tend to be more economically productive, more politically engaged, more capable of sustaining democratic institutions. Reading expands vocabulary, perspective, and empathy. Even when it does none of those things, it entertains.

The second claim is that any particular book is therefore necessary for any particular reader.

This is where my confusion begins.

It is one thing to say people should read more. It is another to say they have a right to read this specific author’s work regardless of the author’s ability to survive from producing it.

A book is not simply the abstract concept of reading. It is the product of someone’s labor. Someone sat down for months, sometimes years, writing it. Someone edited it, published it, distributed it. And in most cases, the author earns very little from that process.

When someone pirates a book and says they cannot afford it, their argument sounds reasonable on the surface. But the survival of that argument rests upon the assumption that the reader’s desire to access that specific work outweighs the author’s need to earn from producing it.

That is a strange moral equation when stated plainly.

The defense usually returns to the importance of reading itself. People will say knowledge should be accessible. That books are tools of education. That society benefits when people read more.

All of which may be true.

But none of those arguments explain why reading must include access to this particular author’s work.

You can read without reading me.

You can read without reading any specific writer whose book you cannot afford. There are thousands of books in circulation. There are libraries, second-hand markets, shared copies, public domain texts, borrowed copies from friends, older editions floating around in markets. Reading, as an activity, does not collapse if you cannot access one author’s book.

The necessity to read does not automatically produce a necessity to read my work.

Which raises the real question that the piracy debate keeps circling but rarely asks directly: is it possible to nurture a reading culture without nurturing a sense of entitlement to other people’s labor?

The two are quietly collapsing into each other in these conversations. The argument begins with something we can all agree with — that reading should be encouraged, that books should be accessible, that societies benefit when more people read. But somewhere along the way that argument mutates into something else entirely: that if a book exists, and if someone wants to read it, then the author’s right to be paid becomes a secondary concern.

That is a very strange expectation to place on writers.

We do not treat other forms of labor this way. Nobody argues that because food is essential, farmers must surrender their harvest to anyone who cannot afford it. Nobody insists that because education is important, teachers must work for free until society catches up. Yet when it comes to writing, there is a persistent assumption that the social value of books should override the economic reality of producing them.

What piracy reveals, more than anything else, is the failure of the publishing ecosystem to balance two legitimate needs: access for readers and sustainability for authors.

Readers want affordable access to ideas.
Authors want to be paid for producing them.

Both desires are reasonable. Neither cancels the other.

Of course, there are structural problems here that make piracy feel more acceptable. Books in Nigeria can be ridiculously expensive relative to income. Exchange rates make imported titles almost inaccessible. Libraries are underfunded or nonexistent. In academic contexts, students are often expected to access materials that cost more than their monthly rent.

Those realities matter.

But acknowledging them does not magically convert piracy into a moral entitlement. At best, piracy becomes a workaround in a broken system. It may be understandable. It may even be inevitable in some cases.

But it still rests on the assumption that the reader’s need to access the work is more important than the author’s need to be paid for creating it.

And that assumption is quite simply morally backwards.

Encouraging people to read is good. A reading culture is valuable. But it cannot be built on the belief that the labor required to produce books does not deserve protection.

As important as your right to read is, it does not give you the right to read any book.