We ain't doing society right

I happen to know about the existence of a couple sites that host digital books. Tons of them. People take a few minutes of their lives to share a book they bought or "stole" with the whole world AND OTHERS ENJOY IT! There's so much positivity around these sites. People from all around the world expressing their gratitude for the books they got to read because of these sites and the people that upload them.

If so many people want to have easy access to information, why not give it to them? Having educated people can only improve society, right? Well, what about the authors? How would they live if they just donated books for free? I don't know the economics well enough, but one could argue that the could still make money from selling physical books and releasing the digital ones for free as there will always be people wanting to read on paper. Let's assume there aren't enough such people.

Then we have two groups of people: one that wants to read and one that wants to write. The want of one exists independently of the want of the other. If one wants to read, they want to read regardless of whether the writers want to write. Same for the writers. (Most of the time.)

The writers (most of them, at least) want to write stuff to be read, so it's in their (honest, cultural, not necessarily monetary) interest that their works reach as many people as possible.

The economics around intelectual work are a bit fuzzy for me. I haven't read anything on the subject. For a "normal" job, you perform work for a number of hours each day and get a wage proportional to that. For writing, I assume you get a portion from each sale of a book. This makes the writer look more like a whole enterprise rather than a worker, since they produce a finished good and sell it. But, at the same time, they produce it once, and they kinda sell it lots of times. And they don't even sell it, they sell the rights to read or reproduce it.

Whether we like it or not, the author has to make money otherwise they starve or freeze to death (people usually prefer authors be alive when writing; some authors like living too).

I'm just rambling, I don't have any solution. I just want everyone to read a lot of stuff for free and have authors write a lot without stressing about money. If you have any idea how, please fix society.