Authors do benefit from libraries; not as much as if everyone bought every book they ever read, but enough. Public libraries actually have efficient economic p

Authors do benefit from libraries; not as much as if everyone bought every book they ever read, but enough. Public libraries actually have efficient economic properties from a macroeconomic perspective that governments should try to replicate and extend: * Authors are paid by the government on behalf of the public in proportion to the demand for their work (libraries buy more copies of popular books to meet demand from patrons). * The public pay the same amount no matter how much information they consume (via their taxes). From a macroeconomic perspective, information has different properties to physical goods: * Information has high fixed costs, and low variable costs. * Variable costs of disseminating information can be spread to individuals other than the original creator. * Once the fixed cost of information that improves productivity is met, the most efficient outcome is to distribute the information as widely as possible. Therefore, there should be a way to compensate information creators in proportion to value to society, without imposing a price disincentive to consume information. One way to do this would be to have an alternative economic system for digital works where there is no limit on how much digital information an individual or company can consume after they have paid a fixed amount in the main system, with allocation of the individual's total in proportion to some metric - such systems are tricky to get right while not incentivising dividing up one invention / work into small pieces or creating complex entity structures to game the system.