Well, there are a few things where you pay first - books, as you say, but also movies, theater, fast food and so forth. Unsurprisingly, this involves high marketing and a tightly controlled supply chain to be profitable, or else a very qualified consumer (no way am I going to pay >$30 for the privilege of reading a paper in Nature or something that I might find interesting, but if I was a specialist in that field that would be different).

I don't worry about the free/non-free thing. I see lots of stuff on the web that I'd consider worth a nickel, a dime, a quarter or even a dollar. The issue for me is that I am not going to get my credit card out and go through the 2-3 minute process of submitting all my billing information for such a tiny amount. Affiliate and adwords-type stuff is faster and better from the consumer point of view, but of course that often results in content degradation: as pointed out on HN recently, why write expertly about an obscure topic when there's more money to be made writing crap about a popular topic.