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Authors now have a potential market they can reach in the billions (language barriers aside). They are not limited to their immediate geographic area by geographic or material constraints.
Their costs of production of a unit (one copy of an ebook) (not the writing, but the production of the end product) are arguably zero.
Their costs /unit to distribute those books are also essentially zero.
Their ability to supply is therefore virtually infinite, and demand is on a scale never previously possible...in fact, exponentially greater than it ever has been before.
There are also more authors, more books, more to read out there.
I'm sorry - but individual books are not worth anywhere near as much today on a per-unit value as they were before.
The video game industry (PC) has been turned on its head because of Steam. People are accepting its relatively minor DRM and BUYING GAMES despite misgivings, because distribution, easy of access, updating, pricing (via frequent experiments) and convenience are all vast improvements over store-bought physical purchases of the same. There is no reason for most PC games to purchase a physical copy if there is an alternative available. We don't get manuals anymore? Or hint-books....you buy those separately.
Until the book market does the same (accepting that $1-2 for a book sold to a few million people online around the world will make an author more than one sold for $30 to 10000 people), those who can will pirate books. The current and coming generations see copyright differently than previous generations. People will pay what a book is worth, and people will copyright infringe (not steal) if it's too much and they still want to read it. Authors/publishers can try to put the genie back int he bottle, but they're ignorant of the realities of a new society that is emerging. Their books aren't worth $11 for a paperback...sorry; they just aren't. Economy of scale has taken care of that, whether they want to admit it or not - the end users see that, whether they verbalize it or not, and until more value is provided, more and more people will seek out alternative ways to get their reading material they'll see piracy of books grow, and their sales decline (generalized book stores are dead, sorry if you're not ready to accept that yet).
Steam is chanign game sales.
Netflix is changing movie distrubution/sales.
Apple/Amazon/others are doing it for music.
Each of these involves drastically lowered costs and/or increased value/convenience.
Authors like JA Konrath who put their money where their mouth is by experimenting, sharing the results etc., are leaders in the future of the book industry, not those who cling to archaic systems which are based on no-longer-relevant-premeses (limited ability to produce, distribute etc) and a false sense of value.
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