Mr. Stross makes an important point. Editors, publishers, and even the executives in the transnational media conglomerates who own book and magazine publishers, are aware of a positive correlation between awards and sales. Thus, when a SFWA member votes for a Nebula Award (usually wanting to see the text first, online if not as a marketing hardcopy freebie); or a paying Worldcon member votes for a Hugo, (hopefully based on seeing the work); there is implicitly a vote as well for non-DRM easily accessed digital versions of the nominated text.

This is imperfect, as it is well-known that awards have considerable logrolling and backscratching and popularity issues, but that won't be solved before the Singularity. In essence, if we, the technocratic elite remember that our award votes are also a means of exerting indirect economic incentives on the ever-more-concentrated media owners to respect writers and readers alike with rational policy, I'd like to believe that we are pushing things in the right direction.

As to popularity, the perfect expression of the unsolvable problem was given by someone about the Tony Awards (for best Broadway shows): First, you vote for yourself (if nominated); second, you vote against your enemies; third you vote for your friends; fourth, if there are any votes left, you vote your conscience.