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Originally Posted by nekokami
It depends entirely on whether they own the electronic publishing rights to their own work, which would have been part of the original contract. Electronic rights (and other rights) can also revert to the author over time. If a publisher still holds the electronic rights, the author is not entitled to directly sell ebooks-- they have presumably been paid for those rights.
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Generally true. Note that some publishers use a different scheme, however. Baen buys
non-exclusive electronic rights along with their paper-book contract. On the other hand, I don't think that those non-exclusive rights ever revert to the author -- I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong on this.
The idea behind non-exclusive electronic rights is this: On the one hand, Baen is confident that their low-price, no-DRM approach is the winning sales strategy. On the other hand, some of their authors don't agree. So... to keep everyone happy, they put their money where their mouth is and purchase non-exclusive rights. Baen's authors can (and do!) arrange to sell their books through Fictionwise or whomever. The word so far is that the royalties via Baen outweigh they sum of the other guys by quite a bit.