Tomas came from money. His parents had bought him his first MacBook at eight. He had never known a library with missing pages, a textbook shared three ways, or a PDF that arrived via a friend’s friend’s USB drive because the official version cost forty euros.

Not metaphorically. Technologically. Line 872 bled into a margin of white noise. Act III, Scene i’s “To be, or not to be” was a gray smudge. And the ghost of old Hamlet—the crucial first appearance—existed only as a string of wingdings and a missing font error.

“For profit, probably,” Tomas said. “There are bots that crawl public-domain texts, inject affiliate links, and repost them on shady ebook sites. The original metadata gets stripped. The cultural heritage gets erased. And people who can’t pay for clean copies read garbage.”