Nobody has a moral right to be reimbursed for the costs they incurred to produce an original work. If they produce it under a contract then they have a contractual right to be paid as stipulated in the contract.
Let me restate what I clearly and obviously wrote: The history professor has no moral obligation to give his book away digitally.
The person I replied to stated unequivocally that people deserve free stuff if it cost nothing. I refuted both that argument and the argument that anything is distributed, let alone produced, without cost.
Is that clear enough or do you want to build another strawman?