Wait, no, you do not just get to claim OCR is as easy as "right click copy, right click paste".
Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it.
Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back.
It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.
None of that matters when the number of copies you can subsequently make is unlimited. The amortized cost of the one-time scan is entirely negligible.
This is the same reason DRM doesn't prevent everything from being on The Pirate Bay. It's not that breaking it is always trivial, it's that you only need one person to do it once. It doesn't matter if it costs one cent or a thousand dollars because neither of those is enough to be a deterrent.
Even if OCR weren't kind of crappy, which is absolutely is, you still have to physically take a scan or photo of every page, potentially assemble them, load it into the OCR software, then distribute it.
Yes, there are services that will OCR a book for some amount of money, but that's still more work than just copying a digital file. I would still need to package and ship the book, get out my credit card to pay, unpackage the book when it's shipped back.
It's categorically more effort, pretending otherwise is just outright dishonest.