I suppose anything's possible, but I would be astonished if there were ever any kind of tax to fund eBooks in the US. Every year we have more and more trouble providing a miniscule amount of funding for PBS, and that's TV, which Americans like. Additionally, getting all countries to agree to the same tax idea seems, to put it gently, highly unlikely. And if some countries do and some don't, the content will be copied and shared from those that have a tax and freely distributed content to those that don't.
More likely, in the American market, is embedded advertising. There would still be the problem that some people would create versions of the content with the advertising stripped out, but most wouldn't bother. Then it wouldn't matter if the files were passed around -- in fact, the publishers would prefer it, because they could then charge more for their ads.
I think this is consistent with Cory Doctorow's views, btw. Every book is effectively an advertisement for more books by the same author (and, to a lesser extent, the same publisher). Cory can hand out free copies of his books, electronically, and still make money, because the free samples encourage people to pay him for more content. This works because he still
sells content as well as giving it away.
It would be an interesting experiment to build a website that would accept manuscripts from authors (or publishers), automatically insert the ads, track downloads, and bill advertisers and compensate authors based on the downloads. A better method would be to track views for both ad rates and author compensation while the user is reading, which would capture views by others the file is shared with, but that would require tracking software integrated with the reader sw that would report back to the server. Not impossible, though. Generally readers are connected to the internet periodically to update content. The tracking stats could be forwarded during the connection process, as long as the process was efficient. I suppose the format of the files could still be open, as the server company would then be motivated to make sure good reader sw existed for as wide a range of platforms as possible. If the server company drops support for future devices, they don't get their ad revenue, but the file is still viewable. If they want the ad revenue, they have to make their reader better than whatever alternatives someone might hack together without the ad trackers.
Then we would just have the problem that some advertisers don't know how to make effective ads and settle for ads that are merely annoying.
Oh, and this would imply a huge invasion of privacy in terms of who's reading what, and how often. But Americans don't seem to worry about that most of the time.
