We can all handle 3 or 4 subscriptions. The dollar amount I came up with was an example. A small federation might charge $1. The invisible hand of the free market decides. The federation would fail if it charged more than the amount of good content it produced. An author could also syndicate her/his content to more than one federation.

If we're not willing to pay for good content, i.e. the writer's livelihood, then we're all fucked. If you read my other comment herein[1], you'd know we're all paying anyway, even though we are fooled into thinking it is free.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761

I'm willing to pay for good content. But I also live in a place where a good software developer (net) salary is €14k/year, and that's still much higher than the average national salary, so I'm wary of these subscription services. They usually end up with a single price (since geo restrictions work poorly on the web), which the invisible hand pushes up to accommodate the disposable income of wealthier places.

As bad as advertisement is, it still helped subsidize my reading when I couldn't afford to pay for it, while the subscription model would create a tiered Internet for the more and less well-off.

So would you be in favor of the advertising business model for books? All books would be free, but there would be ads on the cover and interspersed throughout the book, sometimes on separate pages, sometimes in boxes between paragraphs. There would be product placements, as well as “native ads” which appear to be integral chapters of the book.

What if authors who refused ads just couldn’t compete against the deluge of free books?

What if books had a way of tracking who read them, and this previously private information was sold on the information markets?

No, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't like if most authors published in "book subscription services" either - ads might actually be less bad.

Thankfully, they don't.