Mathew Ingram has a fascinating example of how the interests of authors don't always overlap with the perceived interests of publishers:

Torrentfreak has the fascinating tale of an author — Brazilian-born “magical realist” novelist Paulo Coelho — who has been busily “pirating” his own books, including setting up a dedicated website to point potential readers to BitTorrented copies of his various novels. Coelho says in a video at the Digital, Life and Design conference in Munich (which I’ve embedded below) that when he uploaded Russian versions of his books to P2P networks, his sales started to skyrocket in Russia.

I can imagine that Coelho's publisher is not amused by the "self piracy" thing - but it points out how deep the disconnect is between artists and the businesses that promote their wares. It's getting much easier for artists to "go direct" and not deal with a media company at all, and that's a large part of the reason we are seeing so much desperation from those corners.