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moz's post reminded me of something: another thing about the darknet (at least from my admittedly small experience therein) is that most of the books available do not seem to be pirated ebooks, but scanned hard copy books. One suspects they are loaded with OCR errors, because nobody has that kind of time to not only scan but also proofread all those books. ;-) The larger point is that DRM won't stop those kind of ebooks from being produced and distributed. It will just annoy and inconvenience paying customers.
Steve--the author will engender bad will when the reader, who paid good money to purchase a book, has to repurchase it or do without when s/he decides to switch to a different reading device and, when s/he complains, is accused of stealing from the author and forcing him to live in a garret and his children to walk to school barefoot in the snow because they want their legally purchased books to work on their new device. That hasn't really been a major issue with iTunes because iPod users tend to stick with iPods. Also my understanding is that there is a fairly easy workaround--burn the iTunes music to a CD and re-rip it as an mp3. A mild pain but doable for the average person. Breaking ebook DRM is possible but you have to be reasonably tech-savvy to do it and many people won't think it's worth the bother.
I think the answer is make ebooks affordable and worth the money (that is, have some kind of added value, like DVD extras) and readers will buy them and probably not share more than they do hard copy books. The collectors will continue to play with their substandard toys. The constituencies should not be confused.
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