> Books, especially digital copies, are not property in the same way that a house is property.
Yes, this is why the concept of IP/copyright was invented in the first place. And, as people familiar with the copyright system know, the "property" in "intellectual property" does not mean the same thing as for physical property, and that the reason for its invention was not to give people "ownership" over/"property" of information (that's slang that is inaccurate but useful, assuming that the hearer is informed enough to tell the difference), but to give them a time-limited monopoly over the duplication (the "copy" in "copyright") so that they can make a profit proportional to the number of people who have enjoyed their work, before it passes into the public domain to enrich the cultural commons (which is also explicitly part of the copyright system since its conception).
The reasoning for this is because the cost of duplicating IP approaches zero, so some economic system needs to exist that allows people to make money off of IP, and...
> We have seen for well over a decade now that "pay what you can" schemes to fund music and books can work very well
This is disingenuous and wildly misinformed at best, and flat-out intentionally deceptive at worst. No, "pay what you can" schemes do not work very well. They constitute a tiny fraction of the economy, with a corresponding tiny fraction of people who can actually make a living off of them, because they simply do not scale - in addition to being fundamentally unfair for obvious reasons. The vast majority of people who sell IP do not use these schemes. They do not work, except under specific circumstances, for a very small number of people, and absolutely do not scale to anywhere close to the economy. Anyone with even a small amount of internet exposure knows that systems like this are highly uncommon and very rarely provide for the creator's financial needs.
> Should we paywall every book written in the last 150 years to benefit publishers?
Nobody in this thread has suggested this. This is a ridiculous strawman.
> Or make a free public library of every book available to benefit humankind?
...and this is a ridiculous false dichotomy.
> restricting access to knowledge via copyright is a net harm to society
Beyond a large number of people disagreeing with this as an opinion, the majority of available empirical evidence points to this being objectively incorrect. Society has been greatly enriched through books created and sold under the copyright system.
Even worse, you're ignoring the massive amount of information made freely available on the internet, through scientific papers, and through IP that is voluntarily made available for free consumption by the authors (copyleft content, open-source code). And all of this information is more than you need to live a "good" life or learn almost anything you want to. The vast majority of content locked behind copyright is either entertainment or esoteric knowledge that isn't relevant or needed by anyone who can't afford it (e.g. high-energy particle physics textbooks). Approximately zero people are going to die because they can't get their hands on a copy of Introduction to High Energy Physics.
Finally, you do not have the right to the works of other people's hands without reimbursing them on their terms. That's theft. You can make your own work available for free, if you wish, but you do not have the ability to take other people's work.
The solution is already here. It is copyright. If you want to tune the knobs (e.g. reduce the length of copyright from "70 years after the author's death" to "15 years" or something), then that's fine and reasonable. But these arguments for both IP theft and what is essentially book-socialism directly conflict with both morality and empirical evidence.