Historically most art was financed through patronage/sponsors, wealthy people or institutions that sponsored people for the social status, or commissioned works from them. Both of those systems have been democratized by the internet, with people sponsoring artists they like with systems like Patreon, or just straight paying them money to create something. The same is happening with Twitch subscriptions (essentially donations to the streamer). There's no reason it can't work on a larger scale for most literature. Sure, priorities would shift, but it might also enable authors more creative freedom than publishers are comfortable with.

*In general, so quite possibly also yours.

Everybody deserves to be paid for their work and I would argue that this is more about preserving knowledge than it is about not having the writers get what they deserve.

It's not what most people would want when given a choice, but that does not mean it's very hard to imagine how and why it happens.

I did not mean to imply I approved either, just that, I think "this is insane" is kind of silly. It is, but, it's also inevitable and not new or hard to follow.

In our current world, the currency is money, (vs land or humans in the past) and things pretty much only get done if someone can make money from it, and someone else doesn't make money inhibiting it. That's it. That's the entire mystery.

The unspoken answers to my two questions were "no one" and "many many many". Everything that you can do for yourself, some company somewhere would rather you pay them for it instead. The product doesn't exist because there are zero companies out there with any interest in producing it, and unlike pure information (software), individuals can't just do it for free for the feel goods.

It would require some imaginary and highly different societal structure to alter that equation. The people who would manufacture the home libraries, where do they get the materials and facilities from, and how do they eat, if they aren't selling these either to you directly, or by way of your government and it's taxes? Some kind of co-op type organization that takes the place of a for profit company? And they get their electronics parts and their vegetables from other co-ops since they don't have money to buy them? It could all be done some other way than by counting dollars, but literally everyone in the world would also have to be doing things this other way. And all the people currently on top of the current system will not be the ones rewarded with success under any other kind of system, and so they wield their power to keep things exactly as they are.

I don't mean in an illuminati way like there are 11 people running everything, I mean countless people inhabiting all levels and niches all act to preserve what they think is all they have, in countless little ways. Even people who actually have essentially nothing and would live far better in any other system, because it just takes more imagination than most people have to even consider not having dollars, and more generosity of spirit than most people have to even consider not being able to boss other people through their need of dollars.

We would somehow have to collectively figure out how not to reward the very worst of us with all the leadership positions, both private and public. Ultimately it comes from that. The exact wrong kind of people to make rules are just about the only people who gun for those roles. There are all kinds of asshole things I wouldn't do if I were running things. And I have no interest in being anyone else's boss, nor in figuring out ways to parasite off everyone else or harness them to some will of my own or anything like that, and so I will never end up running things. You have to be a sociopath to do what it takes to ever get into such a position. It doesn't happen by any nice fair reward-the-good kind of way, and we have almost no mechanisms to detect and defer such people from suceeding in their shark-like process. It just works and they go right to the top.