The vast majority of writers do not recoup their investment, not due to piracy but due to a massive glut of works available.

I've published a couple of novels. They've sold far better than average, and yet not sold enough to be remotely worth it if I did it for the money. Piracy might have made a tiny dent, but the many millions of competing novels matters far more.

Anyone who has self published will have experienced that it is hard to even get people to read (as opposed to just download to hoard) your work even for free.

It's more comfortable to blame piracy, though.

I think the current intellectual property system is flawed. Books are knowledge, and we shouldn't be able to limit the spread of knowledge. I imagine that books could be sold at the cost of printing, and there could be a QR code inside so that readers could freely donate money to the author if they enjoyed the book. Strangely enough, I imagine that with such a system, authors would be better paid.

> But I have friends who used to self publish some small esoteric fiction. This commonplace theft has basically made them stop

If you're writing for money, maybe. If you're writing for the love of writing, it won't.

More, you hear of authors who encourage their books to be made available without DRM, who know or silently encourage their books to end up on torrent / library sites. They want their books to be read.