Like I said, make an educated decision. However, the largest reason that authors make so little is that the publishing houses overwhelmingly give them next to nothing. So no, downloads are not the problem. Anecdotally, I have never had an author not send me a digital copy of a book I requested from them (generally because they were hard to get). At the same time, it is pretty obvious which authors are smaller and would thus fall into the category of "people to look out for" I indicated in my first post. And again, I am not here advocating for downloading, simply pointing out that it is quite different than strict theft (which is pretty obvious), and those who claim otherwise, by using a simplistic argument, lose a large part of their audience immediately.