Author's could potentially get a couple months of sales by working with manufacturers themselves and being the first to sell their books. But as soon as untrusted parties can get their hands on the book, someone will start selling their own copies of it.
But if it were legal to distribute copies, these websites wouldn't need to operate in the shadows, switching domain names constantly to evade law enforcement. Instead, these websites could become as easy-to-use as Steam, but instead of paying the creators of the games they could just take 100% of the revenues for themself.
There would be an explosion in what we would call "piracy" today, but what would just be called downloading games if copyright were scrapped, because the barrier to entry for doing so could be made so much lower.
I am not a fan of intellectual property and copyright enforcement (at least the weaponisation of them). But scrapping IP and copyright entirely would be disastrous. I prefer the idea of reducing the amount of time someone can hold IP/copyright for, or additional punishment for patent trolls, or other measures to alleviate the concerns of IP/copyright without destroying R&D and digital work.