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My reason for pointing out that most of the darknet books are scans was twofold:
1 - Even though most commercial ebooks are available in a "cracked" DRM format (LIT), that does not constitute the bulk of the shadow market (i.e. what people are stealing isn't, for the most part, commercial ebooks).
2 - There is enough market demand that people are spending time manually scanning books that are not yet available as ebooks to share, and these have value in the gift economy of the darknet.
If I'm right about this, there is plenty of market demand for ebooks, even now, and if the ease of use was high and the prices reasonable, the darknet could become completely marginalized, without needing any DRM at all. I honestly believe this is the case. I favor social DRM (embedding the identity of the purchaser) just to remind people not to "loan" copies of books too widely, but that should be sufficient to provide a viable ebook market.
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