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A word from the fence-sitter:
DRM became something of a necessary evil when P2P file-sharing started. (The flamers are already cracking their knuckles). Look, a physical book was nice in that you could pass it to your friends, buy/sell at a used book store, or just archive it on a shelf for eternity. However, unless you wanted to spend a bundle at Kinkos, it was always ONE book! That's the key. Only ONE friend could borrow it at a time. Once you sold the ONE book to the store, you no longer had it. The store could only sell ONE book to ONE customer until more came in.
A text file is just a WEE bit different, no?
One person slaps down $6, sticks it on his hard-drive, and now 2 million other people can grab it at once and read it. The author made the world happy and he doesn't have much to show for it. Yes, there will always be people where if they can't get it for free, then they would never have bought it anyway. Point taken, but its certainly not an absolute. Many people would pay for an ebook if it wasn't so friggin easy to just download it.
The holy grail would be if one could somehow prevent the "branching out" of a shared ebook. For instance, if Bob gives Sue the ebook he just read, then Sue would not be able to transfer the ebook to any other device. Bob paid for it, so only Bob has the power to put the eBook onto a device in a readable state (by beaming or Bob's personal password after opening it for the first time).
The PalmReader (errr.....eBook Reader) is probably the closest you can get for a reasonable DRM. I can let any of my friends read the ebook by transferring it, and then typing in my code (no peeking!), and handing back their device. This is akin to iTunes, where anybody can plug in their iPod to my computer and download my purchased songs, but they can't transfer the songs anywhere else from there (auto-sync must be turned off, by the way). You eBooks should be backed up on CD-Rom anyway, so that you can pull up old books. I keep a password-protected filemaker database of my books where I track what VISA card number is attached to each book.
I can assure you with no doubt in my mind that eReader has become popular enough that if it were to die, there WOULD be a way to convert your ebooks. Either they would be transferred to a new service, or someone will have found a crack by then. Every mainstream encryption only needs one ingredient to be cracked: time.
So, if you want to purchase books but don't want to use eReader. Fine. Go ahead and buy .lit books and convert them. The author still gets paid, and I'm not the DRM police. Just please think before sharing them, because the sudden proliferation across the P2P networks does translate into lost money for the author.
Paperbacks don't require the Honor System. eText files do, and this world isn't exactly overflowing with honesty. This is akin to the mark-up we pay in grocery stores to cover the costs of all the shop-lifters. DRM is here because there are so many people who abused the system.
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