[bobthepanda]

Some books are capable of making their own niches. Under the current system they become bestsellers and then their authors become well compensated for all their hard work. You can't really have patrons for a market segment that doesn't exist, or doesn't know that they want that content yet.

It's hard to see how under this funding model something as revolutionary as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring would even get published. The research in those took years and there was no demand for such titles on those topics previously.

[tikititaki]

I know this isn't books, but let's look at 2 examples of games that came out through community funding, either through something like Patreon were people make donations or something like Kickstarter.

A) Dwarf Fortress. It's an incredibly niche game where the creator has spent literally decades of his life working full-time towards the game. He has a vision for the game and he doesn't compromise. The community funding allowed him to do this. It realistically would not have been possible in the current system.

B) Pillars of Eternity 1 (and 2) were both great games that simply weren't getting funding to be made in the business world. Yet it was successful and both were very good games.

I'm not going to claim they are revolutionary or even that great. But I am going to say that without the process, they wouldn't have been developed. I also think that demand would work the same regardless of the system.

If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.

Really, we've hit the point with technology that we simply don't need the middle men anymore. The creators themselves can work directly with the consumers. I don't see a reason to continue the current system besides inertia.

[bobthepanda]

> If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.

But you need something to actually get this going in the first place. It's worth noting that Dwarf Fortress only started getting a financially stable stream of donations because an alpha was bootstrapped. You can't really bootstrap a book based on investigative journalism, there aren't really stretch goals that a book can hit, etc. It works for small tidbits on a regular cadence like a podcast, but this isn't how a book works.

Books are also different from games, in that generally speaking when it comes to community funded games the creator and the patrons are broadly aligned. This is not a good dynamic for book publishing, because then people won't write content that for all its truths may just piss off their existing patrons and leave them destitute.