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Originally Posted by stonetools
My bet is you won't find much, if any, quality biography or science writing or historical nonfiction on your favorite site,
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My favorite site? Of course not; those aren't genres that appeal to me much. I find no shortage of legal analyses and books on education theory to read. I do have trouble finding quality free books about nonChristian theology, but that's a matter of publishing bias and language limitations rather than economics-of-ebooks.
However, I do have access to history and biography books when I do want to read them.
Bookboon has free hard science textbooks. I assume that by "biography" and "historical nonfiction" you mean "books written about the past in recent years," because of course there's no shortage of
biographies and
history books available online for free.
More recent content takes a bit more work to find, but there's no shortage of it. The
SSRN archive has an incredible collection of peer-reviewed research.
FlexBooks are aimed at K-12 students. And while Wikipedia is sneered at by many scholars, it serves as an excellent layman's source of introductory information into countless subjects.
Of course, those weren't all written for free, so your point may stand. My point is not "authors will write for free" (although I did say that, and many will) but "free-to-customers reading content is not going to destroy the literary world." The collapse of the publishing industry systems of the 1960s isn't going to mean the end of quality reading material, including quality nonfiction reading material.
Nobody gets into writing histories or calculus texts because they want to get rich, any more than they decide to write sword-and-sorcery adventures to get rich.
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How are writers who produce that kind of content going to be able to even work, much less get paid?
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Maybe they'll have patrons who pay them to produce specific types of content. This can create skewed content, but given the number and diversity of potential patrons, it's a lot less problematic than this system was a few hundred years ago, when patrons were all upper-class white men. Kickstarter's had some terrific projects.
Maybe we'll have a government arts endowment. (I have doubts about this working--not because it wouldn't be effective, but because if we've reached the point of considering public education a form of "socialist welfare," the public's been brainwashed against believing there's a value in widespread access to knowledge of any sort.)
I know that (1) we're not going to run out of quality content to read while the publishing industry thrashes around looking for new business models and (2) enough people value quality writing, including nonfiction, that they will actively seek ways to reward authors for it.
We have people who want to pay, and people who want to write; the fact that the internet has changed the dynamics between them doesn't mean the destruction of quality nonfic writing.