ShellMonkey

There’s that, and also part that’s donations by viewers and sponsors. While they need funding to maintain operational costs I don’t think they have the typical pressure of expecting a return on investment to deal with, so volunteer supported archiving, hosting via things like peertube or youtube without needing to show ads, there’s room for some novel operations that other content producers don’t have.

The big vs small creator aspect has another angle to it as well though in the idea of exposure. A small creator downloaded by 10,000 may find themselves to be a less small creator due to word of mouth, which actually rather goes to OP’s question of helping their cause via awareness. So those that can or would buy the book do, and those who can’t/wouldn’t still potentially receive the author’s message.

An interesting idea for something like a video game, it gets first released on something like steam with locks for a time, and then when the initial hype passes it gets onto GOG with no locks but is still a nice central storefront. Lots of options out there to work with.

I keep saying, if this stuff is publically owned works made by the corporation for public broadcasting, put up some official torrents and let the public archive it for free. Mr. Rogers would surely approve of sharing for the common good.

It is, but being one who grew up when the OG Napster was a thing I came to look at intangible things in a different way. Replication of data is inevitable, people have been doing it since we first learned to communicate, so trying to perpetually fight it ends up just causing people on both sides grief in the end.

One of the first I recall to use the model I mentioned was Nine Inch Nails and the ‘Ghosts’ album, a novel concept at the time that seems to have been a lot more accepted in recent years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_I–IV

Not just a 'Murica thing, people write extensive literature of many types and ask for money. Some take a strict buy-then-read, some do more akin to the usual open source model of give and ask later.

I rather like the approach of give, ask for donations, and then also sell some physical special version in nice bindings or similar.

Tax the rich, they’re not paying social security on all those capital gains, hell they don’t even pay income tax rates…

Muskrat alone at one point was tagged as having over $1T and you worry about how to find money?