Some books, such as those relating to education, public health, political or social advocacy, or scientific research, fulfill a public purpose. Publication of these books using a form of open-access will further their public purpose. The costs of production and release of these books can financed by foundations, charities, political action committees, private individuals, or governments.
European governments have joined together to fund the digitization and distribution of cultural heritage works through Europeana. Funded by the European Commission and national ministries of culture, Europeana acts as a portal enabling distribution of large numbers of Open-Access e-books. In the US, books created by the federal government belong by law to the public domain, but there's no centralized funding of Open-Access e-books or their distribution.
In developing countries, governments seeking to provide textbooks to large numbers of student will eventually find that producing e-textbooks, released for free, is the only scalable method of providing for their national educational needs. Many states in India, for example, already release their state-published textbooks on an Open-Access basis.
A variation on public funding for Open-Access e-books in the context of academic monograph publishing has been proposed by Frances Pinter. Her idea is for libraries to join together in a cooperative, diverting a fraction of their acquisition budgets to fund the fixed costs of producing new monographs by university and commercial scholarly presses, which would then be made open-access. She estimates that individual libraries could save over 75%, depending on the participation rate.
Another sort of public funding model with a long history of use is the "tip-jar", or more profitably, the pay-what-you want model. Here, the creator urges his audience to leave some money as a "thank you" in return for value received. Doctorow reported receiving over $1200 using a donation box at paypal -- http://www.paypal.com -- which actually did better than his print-on-demand offering.
