Bounty Markets for Open-Access eBooks

"I've been thinking about how to apply threshold pledge systems to the sponsorship of open access for ebooks. I believe that with some modest but essential innovations, a sort of threshold pledge market could become a powerful economic force in many segments of the ebook business. The first innovation would be to create a market that covered ALL books. According to the Google Books team, there are over 100 million books that can be identified in the world; a relatively small fraction of them are out of copyright, and an even smaller fraction of them are available as open-access ebooks. Why not let people sponsor any and every book they cared about? Note that these books have already been written and published, so the sponsors are not being patrons of artistic creation, as in Kickstarter, FashionStake, and Mozart's concerto subscribers, instead, they are posting a reward for conversion to open access. It's wrong to think of this as "ransom publishing"- a parent doesn't kidnap their own child! A better way to think of it is posting a "bounty" for the delivery of the ebook into a Creative Commons compatible license...."