This is a thread I find specially interesting, because I have just changed my approach to payment from readers. Previously I adopted a "shareware" model, asking people to pay a small fee per book if they had enjoyed it. Compared with the colossal number of downloads, the results were meagre.
Having taken advice from
Alexandra Erin, I now say that my books are entirely free. In turn I ask readers to support the process that brought them the books by making a donation of their choice.
I only made the change earlier this month, but it is interesting that since then not one single donation has been made.
My first book was published in 1978, so I belong to a generation of writers who grew up with the old methods. Rotten as they are (from an author's point of view), at least they hold out the possibility of some financial return. Most readers, I suspect, have little idea of the practice and hard work needed to get a foothold in the craft of writing novels; or of the hundreds or even thousands of hours of work that go into a full-length piece. It's a pretty steep gradient to climb, even if you already have a publisher's advance.
DRM does not protect intellectual property. It is too easily cracked. Once a book is in digital form there is nothing but the integrity of computer-users to stop it from being replicated, and I think we know how much, taken overall, that is worth.
The ebook revolution may bring about the death of professional writing of fiction (and quite a few other genres, too). What you will have instead is a plethora of amateur work, some of which will be worth reading but the majority not -- a bit like blogs are today.
I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. Much of the output of professional authors has never been worth reading either. And since younger people and many older ones never read a book anyway, authorship is just one of those outdated jobs, like being a blacksmith, which will survive only in niches here and there.