Abena, who is 18, recently read Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, and thought it was wonderful. She does feel a bit bad about downloading it illegally, she says, but her mother is a single parent who can’t afford to feed her voracious love of books. She has also enjoyed the entire Percy Jackson series without paying its author, Rick Riordan, a penny. She’s not a thief, though, she says: “I wouldn’t take food or clothes without paying the people who made them, because they’re physical things. I believe real life and the internet differ.”

Abena (not her real name) is one of millions of people who use book-piracy websites to illegally download work by authors they love. The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their regular piracy website is shut down; when I contacted some, those who responded always justified it by claiming they were too poor to buy books – then tell me they read them on their e-readers, smartphones or computer screens - or that their areas lacked libraries, or they found it hard to locate books in the countries where they lived. Some felt embarrassed. Others blamed greedy authors for trying to stop them.

When we asked Guardian readers to tell us about their experiences with piracy, we had more than 130 responses from readers aged between 20 and 70. Most regularly downloaded books illegally and while some felt guilty – more than one said they only pirated “big names” and when “the author isn’t on the breadline, think Lee Child” – the majority saw nothing wrong in the practice. “Reading an author’s work is a greater compliment than ignoring it,” said one, while others claimed it was part of a greater ethos of equality, that “culture should be free to all”.

One reader said he’d pirated around 100,000 books in a few hours: 'I doubt I’ll get through even a fifth of them'

Many reported starting to pirate books during university, when faced with bills for expensive textbooks – “I want to spend my limited funds on going out, honestly,” said one 21-year-old University of Warwick student – while others on limited incomes said their disabilities and mental health made library visits a challenge. One disabled and unemployed reader who asked to remain anonymous said: “I don’t think it’s morally wrong to pirate a book if you genuinely can’t afford it. I only get £80 a week. I usually can’t afford to spend £10+ on a new book, but I love reading … It’s not much different from buying from a secondhand bookstore, right? Either way, the writer gets no money.”

But overwhelmingly, most respondents owned up to pirating books not because of cost, but ease. Doctors, accountants and professionals described themselves as well-off, but said they pirated books to “pre-read” them, because they often felt dissatisfied with a book after purchase. “I have paid for some truly terrible books and regretted it – thanks to piracy, I can read first. I’ll buy if it was good enough that I kept reading it,” said one. Another said he’d pirated around 100,000 books in “a few hours” and donated all his physical books to charity shops: “Obviously, I will never read most of those pirated ebooks. Over a lifetime, I doubt I’ll get through even a fifth of my current collection.”

One operator of a piracy website contacted the Guardian to detail how they did it. “I upload anything from science fiction to ridiculously priced university textbooks. I can get any novel that I want in about 30 seconds. If I can’t, I know people in my dark little corner of the internet that can find ANYTHING that is asked for. It’s incredible really.”

Very few reported being negatively affected by it. (Though three readers reported attempting to pirate Harry Potter books, only to end up with erotic fanfiction.) A 42-year-old IT worker in Glasgow complained, “I have a wealthy retired relative who prides himself on pirating books which makes me want to vomit. I don’t think he reads half of them, just hoards them. He can absolutely afford to buy books. I don’t understand people who can spend hours and hours engaging with writing knowing they have ripped the writer off.”

And authors are being ripped off. This week, with the resurgence of a particular piracy site (the Guardian is choosing not to name any of them), novelist Joanne Harris asked publishers to be more “muscular”, to take pirates to court and shut down entire sites instead of arguing over individual titles. But though the problem is costing publishers “billions of dollars annually” according to the International Publishers Association, there is no simple fix.

It is also hard to quantify how bad the problem is, when so few publishers are willing to talk openly about it. One piracy expert at a UK publisher kindly provided some background information for this article off the record; the rest refused to speak to me - though Penguin Random House and JK Rowling’s publisher Pottermore offered statements to say that they take piracy very seriously.

The legal and tech aspects of book piracy prevention are complex and fast-evolving, but those in the know describe it very simply: it’s whack-a-mole. One of the most persistent ebook pirate sites has been taken down multiple times, only to pop back up again under a .com, a .net and a .org domain name. At least 120,000 take-down notices have been issued against it already, involving web crawlers, lawyers, its domain host and the Metropolitan police. But that website is back regardless, complete with some intimidating legal language of its own, addressed to anyone who plans to complain.

Asked for a comment, an administrator for the website replied: “Hilarious. We don’t have time to do something bullshit, but let me give you a list of websites where books are available to be downloaded for free bigger than our site thousands time [sic].” And the list of sites they sent was indeed extensive, all offering books by well-loved children’s authors, YA and adult bestsellers, as well as some writers who are just starting out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘These people mistakenly think they’re sticking it to the man. They’re not; they’re sticking it to the little people’ ... Joanne Harris. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

One of these is the Waterstones children’s books prize winner Michelle Harrison, who has drawn attention to the issue on Twitter. “I feel pretty despondent about it all,” she says now, having been called “elitist” and “not worthy of being an author” by angry pirates when she pointed out that they were stealing her work. “It’s all very well publishers sending take-down notices, but we all knew it was only a matter of time before the site sprang up again under a different guise. It’s fighting something we can’t win.

“I’m a single working parent trying to stay afloat, so I can’t afford the time and expense it would take to continue to pursue this and make my deadlines … I can’t understand the mindset of a person who thinks it’s acceptable to harass an author for wanting to protect their rights.”

There are organisations fighting hard to make the law catch up with technology. The Publishers Association has a portal that can help deal with infringements, but its CEO Stephen Lotinga admits it is a Sisyphean task. The PA believes governments, search engines and ISPs should be doing a lot more. The Society of Authors, meanwhile, believes domain providers should be made to police piracy on any sites they host, and is urging its members to write to their MEPs to support the provisions of the Copyright Directive, which would make platforms accountable for anything illegal they host. The Intellectual Property Office, meanwhile, says that it is working on it, and claims that the UK has one of the best IP enforcement regimes in the world, and that “if deficiencies in the current legal provision are identified, proposals will be developed to address them”.

Series authors are vulnerable: when book one does well, but book two is heavily pirated, book three could end up dead in the water

Even private companies are getting involved. Che Pinkerton is the CEO of DMCA.com, named for the Digital Millennial Copyright Act, a 20-year-old US law that is still followed in many jurisdictions. DMCA.com works with lawyers and law enforcement, but it is primarily a tech company, and the way it tracks down infringers is its “secret sauce”.

Pinkerton puts the rise in piracy down to the growth of “user-generated content” – such as blogs and personal websites – and he sees every day how the law is playing catch-up with the technology. To issue a take-down notice, he often has to deal with several parties in different jurisdictions, and can only tackle infringements one at a time. Often, the domain provider will be deluged with take-down notices, and will remove the entire site, just to get the stream of correspondence to stop. But this approach doesn’t stop sites popping up again under a new name, with a new provider. No wonder it is hard to manage.

All this is exhausting for authors, but it could be devastating for readers, too. Harris, a representative of the SoA who speaks passionately on behalf of authors, knows several who have lost contracts because piracy drove down their sales to an unsustainable level. The most vulnerable authors are those who write series: when book one does well, but book two is heavily pirated, book three could end up dead in the water. Midlist authors, and those who barely scrape a living are also at risk. “These people mistakenly think they’re sticking it to the man,” Harris says. “They’re not; they’re sticking it to the little people, the people who are struggling … and they don’t care.”

Education, not regulation, is key, she told the Guardian: “If there is a solution to this, rather than keep trying to shut down these sites, it is to get the reading public to understand why using them is dishonest, wrong and is killing publishing and killing diversity in publishing. When you realise that [authors] are not really unlike you at all, you see that what it boils down to is you’re stealing the product of someone else’s work.”

On that note, Abena has recently had a revelation. She makes a little money by selling art online, and has started to think about what would happen if art lovers began downloading that for free, just because they really wanted it. “It would hurt and I’d be super-angry”, she says, after we exchange messages for a few days. “The fact that they don’t have much money doesn’t make it OK and it doesn’t make what I do OK either. I guess I do have to stop.”

One down – just a few million to go.