Yeah. So many problems caused by businesses who simply refuse to die. Their time has passed but they simply refuse to go away and let humanity move on. The entire copyright industry for example.
Physical books are valuable. Some people just prefer them over ebooks. As physical items, making and distributing copies is non-trivial and costs money. Due to their scarce nature, it actually makes sense to sell them.
Under a no-copyright model, people willing to pay for physical books isn't directly linked to publishers/printers still willing to pay the author, though.
While I understand what you're getting at, how do you determine the actual value of the author's labour in advance, though?
Copyright allows you to speculatively publish a work and let that determination of how valuable your work actually was happen afterwards, by taking the number of people willing to pay for it as a proxy for your labour's value.
