Lecture offers are secondary income streams for nonfiction authors (actually very similar to what live performances are for music).
Also, it would perfectly possible for publishing houses to find secondary income streams if they desired, but it is easier to complain about illegal copies than to find new income sources:
Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
Coz they'd prefer to control the supply and get all the profits while giving actual writers a pittance and having in their contracts that anything they write belongs to corporation that paid them. Similar deal with code really...
Funny, I was just thinking of this.
In this current world of copyright, the secondary income stream for books seems to be selling rights to make movies & television shows for the larger audience.
Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of anything in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers make money.
I'd argue with some forms of writing / publishing books are the secondary income stream.
There seems to be a growing audience for online serial fiction as well as technical books that are written by the chapter, where some readers pay for early access to chapters that have yet to be released.
The outputs of these are quite long, so at some point a block of chapters gets bundled into a "book" as well as an audiobook on occasion and then sold on amazon.
Some authors then hide / remove the earlier chapters (this is not universal), or add extra bits in the book and then publish this for people who are hearing that "This story is really good, get the book to find out what happens".
Not sure what the actual economics looks like at the macro level, but it seems some authors are doing it as their full-time gig.
I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a no-brainer.
I grew up with libraries, then the internet came, and I thought libraries were dumb.
Now, marketing droids own the internet, and I think libraries are miraculous.
(I guess like Netflix doesn't have every movie.)
