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I agree with you guys. Cory's experiments worked out well only because e-readers are a tiny slice of the pie. When the day comes that e-readers are a majority slice I think this approach will face-plant. I don't know the "right" answer for publishers. Perhaps DRM will endure indefinitely and piracy will remain below the threshold of pain for publishers. It would help if we had fewer DRM'd book standards. The consumer would have less fear of format-obsolescence. That seems like the path-of-least-resistance future.
If all writing is free to the consumer we'll be swamped with crap. I can see some sort of on-line reputation systems helping good authors rise above the muck but it would subject to spoofing, just as "astroturfing" spoofs proper grass roots movements.
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