No, I am literally having a hard time understanding why people are so automatically suspicious of ebooks. My bias on the table: writing books is so non-remunerative that making them almost seems like charity to me.
Very often the real return in writing an (e)book is personal branding. It's a pretty effective SEO technique. I don't see why this isn't obvious to you. I literally know more than a handful of people whose primary motivation for writing an ebook was that it would raise their profile. That's half the reason why so many ebooks are free, kind of similar to how and why (partly) people contribute to OSS projects without pay.
