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DRM doesn't work and won't ever work, on account of one single, unavoidable technical requirement: at some point between the secure, encrypted file and the eyes of the human consulting it, the book needs decoding.
Even assuming a perfect encryption scheme that creates an airtight DRM file, all one needs to do to recover the clear version of an encrypted file is figuring out which bit of the memory to read. It may be anything from the filesystem cache to the malloc()ed area in ram where the decoded file is kept for processing, to the screen's framebuffer, but somewhere in the memory, the clear-text file is there. Anybody with a JTAG interface and a little experience can recover the file.
Heck, even if the hardware is really good at keeping its innards unsnoopable, there's always the crude method of taking screenshots and running them through an OCR, which works incredibly accurately because the characters displayed on the screen are much more consistent and smudge-free than a paper book's.
And if you think that's a lot of trouble to decrypt a file, remember that it only takes one motivated dude and an internet connection. Once the clear-text file is out on the net, the cat's out of the bag and the publisher has lost.
So, DRM is useless. The sooner the industry realizes that and invents a new business model to sell books (or music or films), the better for us the customers, as well as them.
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