No, I mean this literally. Children don't have any income and can't access the content as the artist intends. What they do have is lots of free time, which can be used to learn how to run piracy software. They also have not yet developed empathy, so they have no problem stealing from artists.
If the highly paid adult readers of Hacker News are pirating artists' creative works, and take offense to me pointing out that piracy is for developing brains who can't afford things, then it's a conversation they need to have with themselves, not me.
I don't think either are _incredibly_ impractical. They're both impractical in different ways to different people. The downsides of e-books are dealing with digital files, the many technological shortcomings of e-ink screens, and the e-book reader itself is a high-value item that attracts unwanted attention.
I understand some of those are hand-waived away on a Hacker Forum full of technologists, but they describe the uncanny valley of e-book reading for many book readers. Your novel's statistics don't surprise me!
This comic is no longer relevant; you can see every Game of Thrones episode in existence by visiting hbo.com, and following a very straightforward streaming sign-up process. The price of admission is cheaper than all the legal options the character tried in the comic.
I guess The Oatmeal author forgot to update their decade-old comic to reflect the current state of things.
They did manage to add an update to the bottom of the website though, which says "Please don't steal." This either contradicts the message in the comic or piracy only matters when it happens to Matthew Inman specifically.
I recommend buying actual books from local bookstores (bookshop.org can middleman) and then giving them away to a local library when you're finished with them.
If the highly paid adult readers of Hacker News are pirating artists' creative works, and take offense to me pointing out that piracy is for developing brains who can't afford things, then it's a conversation they need to have with themselves, not me.