Authors in the current publisher system are paid beforehand and the publishers job is to earn the money to make it no loss for the publisher. The author gets a share of the earnings after that.
Currently ebooks are no problem at all for this system. It will be many years until ebooks can threaten paper books. When this time has come legal sale through downloads will take over. The current uproar about "piracy" is mainly from the content industry which thinks it does not earn as much as they should. That is far from not earning money at all.
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