You don’t pay enough in taxes to fund this model — not even a significant fraction of it. If you want to switch to a user-pays-to-rent model, there are iTunes/Netflix-alike options out there — go nuts. But our societies and our literature would be worse off if we all did.
It’s not a pay-to-rent mode they are proposing. They are proposing getting rid of scarcity and allowing folks to borrow for a period of time, as many times as they’d like. An option to keep it longer than the allotted time is akin to a late fee.
In what way would more access to literature make society worse off?
There's near-infinite access to free literature, it's called the internet. Any author who wants to make their work freely available can just put it online.
