@Sandra As far as I can tell, authors could make money by selling physical books of texts and access to digital copies, if it wasn't for publishers very carefully ensuring that authors are pretty much forced to go through them and hand over their copyright for the book that they wrote - so the publishers can take all the profit and maybe leave some scraps for the author(s) that wrote the book in the first place.

It would be good if there was a non-proprietary transaction "platform", where purchasers and sellers alike could make transactions without everything getting stolen by middlemen.