I'm glad the system is working for you, but it's not working for a whole lot of other authors. There are a lot of authors who are always complaining about "piracy ruining" their businesses and so forth while consumers meanwhile constantly complain about prices, DRM, etc. Clearly this is a problem that needs to be solved in a way that makes everybody feel like the interests of both sides are balanced.

Every author who's published by a traditional publisher will agree with you that the system has problems, but I guarantee you won't find many who think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and turned into Spotify or OnlyFans or whatever you think the new model is going to look like. Otherwise you would already see a lot more established authors defecting! The truth is the current system, for all its faults, supports the production of a lot of wonderful work, and generally people want to get into it, not out of it.

I think the biggest misconception here is in fact what I'm proposing doesn't actually change much. Legalizing noncommercial infringement is just affirming the reality we already live with. Millions of people are noncommercially infringing every day. To the extent that it undermines your business model, that undermining has been priced into your business model for decades because people who don't want to pay are already not paying. What I'm asking people to consider is new and innovative ways to bring those people who will never pay you into your business model instead of pretending they don't exist or publicly shaming them as pirates. Better to have the freeloaders watch your ads or something than to let the ad revenue go to pirate sites.

Once this change is made, won't somebody just start a website that looks exactly like the Amazon Kindle Store except everything is free to download, and it's legal? You don't think that will hurt our sales at all? I know people online think "Anyone who pays for a piece of media is essentially making a voluntary donation because they could so easily pirate it if they wanted", but that actually isn't true in the real world. Making it legal, convenient and non-shady to get stuff for free would change a lot of people's behaviour.

Those sites already exist. They're often more convenient than getting media from the author. Paying for media is already a voluntary donation. I really don't think legalizing noncommercial infringement will change the status quo much except to even further incentivize copyright holders to modernize by making the need to do so even more obvious.

No, this is just my point. Among people on message boards, for whom copyright is oppression and piracy is second nature, paying for media is a voluntary donation. For the average person in the world I am selling my books to, that is not yet the case. They are in the habit of getting stuff the legit way – it's not worth dealing with something a bit complicated and icky when ebooks are pretty good value for money anyway.

Surely this is exactly why the Emergency Library has had such a rapturous reception! Because it's exactly what I described – an (apparently) legit, feel-good, well-publicised, reasonably simple way to get any book you want for free. That has not existed before. Otherwise why would anyone care?

I don't think it's true that the existing pay per copy regime is actually forcing anybody to pay who doesn't want to. Everyone knows how to get media for free. The choice not to is already mostly an expression of voluntary donation.

As such, I think if every such work was instantly converted to a pay what you want model with a default asking price set, below which you're presented with a bunch of ads and an annoying email harvesting form or something, the majority of people would still pay the default price out of a combined desire to avoid annoying ads, avoid annoying forms, and to support the author.

Some would pay more if given the option to increase the amount paid in exchange for relatively trivial perks. Even I—defender of piracy extraordinaire—have voluntarily paid for luxury tiers for freemium content on numerous occasions.

Did your royalties, as an author, go up accordingly? Or was that money absorbed by the publishers?

Publishers getting richer is not a sign that the system is working as intended.

Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.