Dividing by a population of 333 millions, we arrive at an annualised per-person book sales figure of just over $27. For a family of four, that's less than $110 annually.
Discussions of books, other content, copyright, and authors almost always descends into lamentations of "but authors should be paid". Those lamenters at the same time seem utterly insensitive to the fact that many millions of people in the US, and billions worldwide, could have access to information but do not, because of an industry-driven interest, largely of publishers rather than authors, on insisting on direct, per-copy, payment for works. This utterly obsolete practice has an enormous deadweight cost in loss of access to information.
I'd given household and family bases above, but the fairer allocation would be based on income or even wealth. I'm sticking with income as those values are easier to find.
Total household income in the US is ... let's call it $9 trillion.[1] So that the $9 billion in book sales is 1/1,000 of household income, equivalent to a taxed rate of 0.1%. The median household earning about $63,000 could have unlimited access for only $63 a year, or $5.25/month. Households falling below the median would pay even less, and I'd suggest a progressive scale to ensure that this fall to nil for lower incomes generally.
That would provide all the present income to authors and publishers, access to unlimited books (I'm assuming digital formats), and lift those deadweight losses, free up access to materials presently under copyright but not available for purchase at all, and much, much more.
Publishers would lose no wealth. Though I strongly suspect we'd discover that what in fact motivates them is power and control.
Total bookstore sales in the US are apparently on the order of $9 billion annually.
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...>
Dividing by a population of 333 millions, we arrive at an annualised per-person book sales figure of just over $27. For a family of four, that's less than $110 annually.
Discussions of books, other content, copyright, and authors almost always descends into lamentations of "but authors should be paid". Those lamenters at the same time seem utterly insensitive to the fact that many millions of people in the US, and billions worldwide, could have access to information but do not, because of an industry-driven interest, largely of publishers rather than authors, on insisting on direct, per-copy, payment for works. This utterly obsolete practice has an enormous deadweight cost in loss of access to information.
I'd given household and family bases above, but the fairer allocation would be based on income or even wealth. I'm sticking with income as those values are easier to find.
Total household income in the US is ... let's call it $9 trillion.[1] So that the $9 billion in book sales is 1/1,000 of household income, equivalent to a taxed rate of 0.1%. The median household earning about $63,000 could have unlimited access for only $63 a year, or $5.25/month. Households falling below the median would pay even less, and I'd suggest a progressive scale to ensure that this fall to nil for lower incomes generally.
That would provide all the present income to authors and publishers, access to unlimited books (I'm assuming digital formats), and lift those deadweight losses, free up access to materials presently under copyright but not available for purchase at all, and much, much more.
Publishers would lose no wealth. Though I strongly suspect we'd discover that what in fact motivates them is power and control.
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Notes:
1. We're working with 333 million people in the US (<https://www.census.gov/popclock/>), 2.6 per household (<https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410220>), and a mean (not median) household income of $72,641 (in 2014, <https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser...>).