Kindle books and paperbacks from createspace.com (subsidiary of Amazon) pay much higher royalties. Check their sites for details. They offer a much better deal for writers who can edit and produce their own books. I use Scribus for cover layout and LyX for excellent typesetting. Production is some work but not nearly so much as the writing which might take me a year or two per book. I have been very pleased with both outfits. Writers no longer need to go through big name publishers. Creative Commons copyrights protect the writer's interests. My own free ebooks have been downloaded 75,000 times from
www.memoware.com and many more times from other sites that got the books from project Gutenberg. Writers can format for project Gutenberg without too much hassle. Times are changing fast and for the better.