@thomasfuchs Published author here. I get paid somewhere in the region of 5-10p (let's call it a dime) every time someone checks one of my books out of a library, on top of the royalties from the library buying it. So yeah, if someone borrows Basic Maths For Dummies[^0], I get compensated *whether or not it turns them into a highly paid professional*.
"Construed literally, it is absurd, and yet it is successful." It seems to have been used for about a century despite nobody really having an explanation for why it worked.