I understand your point of view.

I have priced books between "I make no money on them" up to "I make a few bucks per sale". The pricing itself was never the issue. I do not sell many of the books that are priced below profit margins. I sell some above profit margin.

When it comes to buying from self-published authors, or authors in general, or anything created by one individual, I see paying as a way of contributing to that author, creator, etc. It is my way of showing appreciation for their work.

I can get books with a lot of pages for a few bucks or pay $ 10 for an ebook sold by a single creator. Mind you, I will not pay $10 for a Kindle book but might pay $10 or more for PDFs. There is always a way to get books cheap.

But that is not how I buy...

Maybe it is important to you to appreciate self-published books as well and appreciate the creator and help them in one way or another. Maybe you are talking about that later on in the post. I do not know.

And I do not know because I couldn't read the post to the end because it is parked behind a paywall and I am certainly not paying $5 a month to a corporation just to read a few articles online.

But maybe, here I am as cheap as you are with buying books?