Each public library pays amount x into a government fund for each person living in its coverage area. Said government fund then pays for this:<p><a href="http://rowling.books/index" rel="nofollow">http://rowling.books/index</a>
(served as a JSON or Marc file)<p><a href="http://rowling.books/hp1.txt" rel="nofollow">http://rowling.books/hp1.txt</a>
(or ePub, mobi or HTML)<p>It won't happen while publishers keep putting $40 books in the bookshop and expect to be able to sell them. Nor will it happen while Elsevier still charges $80 for that article you can only see the abstract of. But between getting said book as a text file from untold websites or torrents already or for half a dollar used at Amazon or some local second-hand bookshop, the above might really be the answer.<p>And let Goodreads, IMDB and Amazon worry about the metadata and discovery and the review aspects.<p>What we have right now flies in the face of Tim Berner-Lee's statement "Cool URIs don't change". They really don't and they never should. And librarians are hating it.<p>We have a gross inefficiency in the system as it stands, and neither Amazon's Lending Library thing nor paywalls nor keeping on charging for books on a per-book basis are the answer.<p>We don't just need a Steam for books, we need the web and some way of nixing this whole DRM problem. DRM is a symptom of the problem, and that's problem is getting authors paid. If it's out of my taxes (or some other way that leaves me paying about $10 a month per household or even some reasonably priced subscription service, Netflix-esque) and there's adequate metrics for determining which author should get paid for which publishings of theirs, then I'm all for it.<p>We've managed to fund public broadcasting. Maybe it's time to fund public booksharing.<p>I just hope that 2020 will be the year of:<p><a href="http://rowling.books/hp1.txt" rel="nofollow">http://rowling.books/hp1.txt</a><p>or<p><a href="http://asimov.books/foundation.html" rel="nofollow">http://asimov.books/foundation.html</a><p>or<p><a href="http://criterion.books/12-mockingbird.epub" rel="nofollow">http://criterion.books/12-mockingbird.epub</a>