[Myrmornis]

Yeah, that's not really how it works. See dagw's sibling reply, and note that there's a continuum between academic monographs that would only ever be in university libraries, to popular science books, in between which is a large textbook market, and note that you can download all the above for free right now from libgen. And I am not moralizing. It's an amazing free resource! Transformative for people in nations at an economic disadvantage, and transformative for people in the first world too -- it would cost thousands of dollars or hours of inefficient library visits to be able to consult such a breadth of resources. I just don't know how exactly we/society should think of this.

[gkya]

I believe we should fund most of it through the academicians wage. And if that resource is deemed too low for them at its current value in a certain country, increasing it is a better solution than trying to add extra rewards for things like books.