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Very good post ficbot! Lots of great ideas in there, but I think many of them require a lot of courage on the part of authors interested in promoting their own e-books.
Publishers have the money to promote books, the corporate lawyers and the distribution network, so authors choosing to move away from that are taking a leap. Publishers signing authors for print works obviously lock them in for ebooks, so it's difficult for authors to get large print book promotion/distribution without locking themselves to poor e-book sales models.
Some authors do have contracts which allow them to sell e-books through other methods though... I was listening to a CNET podcast the other day and a couple of the guys were authors (some kinds of computer books not sure what). They all said they make WAY more per e-book sale compared to print sales. Somehow they had publisher contracts which allowed them to sell e-books independently. So authors can make a lot more, the major limitation is publishers with those restrictive contracts linking print and e-books.
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