[Thespian2]

While I agree, there still remains the practical question of who would pay. In the physical book library world, the library pays for a quantity of physical books, and lends them for free to the patrons. They are reimbursed for various fixed costs by existing grants, and taxes, and similar funding streams. The physical scarcity supports this model, by capping costs.

If we remove the scarcity, and pay authors per reader or per page (a good thing, in my opinion) we uncap the expense the library must bear if something becomes popular. One could shift the costs to the users, but then what is the point of the library? The user is just buying an ebook, and we already have markets for that.

The library gives access to books to those who can't afford them. Artificial scarcity sucks, but actually serves a purpose in this context.