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Remember that the Wall Street Journal of today is not the Wall Street Journal of a few years ago. Thanks to the sale, it is no longer unbiased or neutral in any way, though it continues to pretend to be. You may agree or disagree with its political (and by association business) angle, but never forget that it has one, quite a strong one.
Back to ebooks: If I buy a pbook for $18 at a big box store, the author gets, what, maybe a dollar or so? If I buy an ebook for $3 from Smashwords, the author gets $2.00. And I'll be buying a lot more of those $3 ebooks. Maybe not six times as many (I do need to sleep sometimes, not to mention pay for my Internet connection) but I'll certainly be buying twice as many, at the very least. So I can spend $18 at Border's and some author gets $1, or I can spend $6 at Smashwords and some author(s) get $4. The only ones I see getting the shaft are the inefficient distributors and the people trying desperately to cling to their old business model, even if they have to legally mandate that every automobile carry a buggy whip.
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