That would be Kindle Unlimited model, as far as I know they pay authors by pages read.
But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term.
Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.
“...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.
This could have a terrible incentive for authors to spread the information thin across a ton of pages to artificially increase their earnings, so we'll end up with books that are the equivalent of online recipes today where there are 3 pages of SEO garbage before the actual recipe.
On the one hand, there are no 10 hour songs with some great part spread out randomly throughout that listeners have to find (obvious, and I think such a book wouldn't be successful either).
On the other hand there are tons of generated crap on Spotify, than sometimes sneaks into your playlists (even things contained text-to-speech advertisement).
I think all such platforms would need some kind of spam filter functionality and a good rating / statistics system so that quality content could be surfaced.
But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term.
Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.