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This thread inspired me to register on the forums here.
First, on the issue of libraries, its seems the concept of the public library available to all was originally formulated by Ben Franklin. I may be wrong on this, but, I am reading, or actually listening via TTS, to his autobiography on my Kindle, via Project Gutenberg.
And based on what he said, the whole purpose of libraries was to address the problems stemming from the scarcity of books. In his time, they were indeed scarce, so he utilized his intelligence and his excellent abilities of persuasion and social organization to create the beginnings of the library system, or put another way, Franklin utilized the best technology of his time to make the collected intelligence of humanity available to as many people as possible, for he apparently saw a great value and unlimited potential in this.
Now, Franklin did solicit donations for this undertaking in the form of a yearly subscription, but he was never very fond of collecting money, and were he given the opportunity to do so, he would have avoided it entirely. And nowhere in his memoirs do I see an overriding concern for proper compensation of the authors, publishers, proofreaders, editors, janitors, etc. ad nauseum, to the effect of a set stipend paid to them each time their book was read, as today's DRM schema seems to be leaning towards.
It seems that authors of that time wrote their books as means of expressing thought, of telling stories they wanted told, and they did so freely and apparently without the incentive of potentially vast amounts of financial compensation.
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