I am with pitaj here, intellectual property is fundamentally wrong, but this is a good example of something that I'm not sure would work under no copyright. "Pay what you want" is one way, though I don't have any statistics on if that collects enough money. Another could be selling signed copies or otherwise making some copies exclusive in a way that copying them nullifies. Pay what you want + signed copies + patreon style donations might be enough?

I don't have a good answer to this. I would therefore suggest decreasing the duration of copyright to somewhere around 5-10 years to give the copyright holder time to sell the work with exclusive rights, after which the work enters public domain (like copyright was initially intended to work).

In germany, for a while, there was no copyright on books, so authors faced the same problem.

This was largely solved by selling high quality books as the competition only made cheap books. This seems to have largely worked until newspapers got angry that a small percentage of people read the news without paying.

I think that is just your opinion, it is a different kind of product which has direct feedback from an active readership that is directly funding your product. Leads to less snafus like George RR martin who is ostensibly making a product for readers but is so disconnected from the readership that he thinks 5+ years between books is ok.

http://topwebfiction.com/ is good example of works that are mostly funded by patreon(young adult focused) that sidestep this problem.

Kickstarter.

You think Cormac Mccarthy could have gotten the funds to write Suttree through Kickstarter?

Or honestly even AFTER writing Suttree would have been able to get enough funding to write one of his better books?