It never ceases to amaze and dismay me how we've built the greatest library in human history, one with intrinsic properties of unlimited readers per book, negligible distribution cost, and minimal barriers to access, and then done our best to sabotage those properties.

Since the typically imposed access barriers are based on copyright law, the situation could be improved somewhat by:

a) reforming copyright law to allow orphan works to enter the public domain, and

b) enabling authors to (easily) add creative commons licenses (minimally something like CC BY-NC-ND) permitting unlimited readers in digital libraries.