They aren't being forced to subsidize anything, and access to free books isn't the issue here.

Property rights is the real issue. Copyright holders have certain rights granted to them by copyright law. Those rights aren't simply necessary, they are fairly balanced. Now the copyright holders want to take rights away from consumers, things like the right to resell or lend, and create an intrinsically unbalanced system.

I would argue that rights holders are actually looking back to feudal times, when power was concentrated into the hands of a few (e.g. landowners and guilds).