As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, knowledge is a global public good.[1] And public goods inevitably result in market failure. Information and markets simply don't work.
The classic way to pay for public goods is through a tax, or tax-like, general assessment, preferably indexed by income or household wealth.
As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion in annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per month fee for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax basis (say, rolled into your broadband access charge).
This would provide compensation equal to all current book sales, and avoid both the deadweight losses of information access denial of the present system as well as the Federal Crime of Letting People Read by which the so-called US Justice system assassinated Aaron Swartz.[4]
As jl2618 recently noted,[5] Criminalisation of digital distribution was only legislated in 2008 as 17 USC 506 (again in the U.S.), under Public Law 110--403:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ403/pdf/PLAW...
A small, progressive, integrated fee would address the grossly specious complaint that "authors must be paid".
Yes, pay them, and decriminalise knowledge access.
I've noted much of this before, including:
"A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" (2014) <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...> (I've since suggested that broadband service providers act as the gateway for revenue collection.)
"What the academic publishing industry calls 'theft' the world calls ;research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular" (2016) <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...>
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Notes:
1. Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. <https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/30...>
2. E.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625>
3. "Book store sales in the United States from 1992 to 2021" <https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...>
4. The Archive Org Open Library link above in footnote 1 is presented by way of one of the many information innovations Swartz pioneered: the Open Library itself.