If books should be free, how to pay their production costs? Kickstarter before the internet

In Dr. Johnson's time (1709-1784) authors would commonly raise funds to write books by collecting subscriptions beforehand. They would put out advertisements and recruit friends and colleagues to spread word of mouth and to solicit subscriptions. In essence, this was Kickstarter for the 18th century.

In this time there was no copyright law in England. There was, however, a gentleman's agreement among book publishers which enforced a sort of copyright. The custom held that one publisher owned the rights to publish a certain work and that any other publisher who printed it was in violation. Thus there was an infamous publisher who would print cheap editions of works 'under copyright' - he was something of an outcast among the other publishers. In fact, Boswell reports in his biography of Johnson that another publisher was attempted to enforce his customary copyright in court. I do not know the outcome, but it is possible that this gentleman's agreement was the source of our modern copyright law.

In any case an author generally did not rely on copyright protection to make his living. And that is a worthwhile thing  to know now, when the digital world has made the formerly scarce good of books into a non-scarce good. In a non-scarce good there can be no theft. But its production still has to be paid for. How, then, the well-meaning and morally consistent man will ask, can we enjoy the fruits of on the internet and the endless duplication and sharing of goods (like music, books, movies, and software) which it makes possible, and yet ensure that these goods can stills be produced?

Look back to an age before copyright. How were books paid for then? One way was through the Kickstarter method. Kickstarter and in general the technique of taking subscriptions is a way for would-be authors to acquire the funding to write books, even in a copyright-free world.

How great would it be if subscription were introduced into academic publishing? The status quo now is for scholars to be allotted grant money, generally by governments. In other words, money is taken from citizens and given to scholars. How much more moral academia would be if the funding for scholarship came not from coerced but from voluntary payments?

Impossible, you say? Well, probably impossible if your goal is to maintain the current rate and volume of academic publishing. But a reduction in the present cataract-scale output of taxpayer-funded scholarship, especially in the humanities, would probably be a very good thing. Put simply, at present, it is probable that the supply of this good exceeds demand to a ludicrous degree. In fact demand is hardly a factor at all. Were supply allowed to rely, even a little bit more, on demand, a great deal of ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean might be ended.