Quote:
Originally Posted by Horemheb
the voting with purchase works only in cases where there are critical differencies between purchase choices. The problem is that all of the above mentioned shortcomings are equally present in all choices available at the moment. Moreover we cannot even see the light at the end of the tunnel considering that this entire business area is captured by the big six
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Look harder.
You genuinely do have the choice to ignore the DRM feature on your reader and buy only DRM-free books from any region. The sacrifice is that it limits your choice of electronic titles, excluding most recent works by popular authors.
Webscription.net offers contemporary s.f. from Baen and others.
Fictionwise.com survives and allows you to show only "multiformat" files. They include some good s.f. backlist published by E-Reads.
Some individual authors are able to sell backlist on their own sites - see Closed Circle and Book View Cafe. I believe s.f & f. is quite prominent here also.
If you read French, many native French publishers apparently forgo DRM.
And there are public domain works on Amazon and Gutenberg, which are tracked and taken notice of. In some cases this will be something publishers are theoretically monitoring - e.g. Penguin who sell "value-added" classic ebooks (or the obvious example being something like Wind in the Willows, where the out of copyright version doesn't have the best illustrations).
As for public campaigns, there's a general anti-drm campaign called "Defective by design". Personally I think that's the most important issue. The other two you raise could be seen more as teething problems. Georestrictions aren't a major problem once your region+device has a local e-book store with full coverage. But there's no real sign that large publishers are thinking about DRM-free books yet.
In that context, one problem is that Amazon appears to have captured the market (and hence, many people don't see a reason to worry about being locked in to Amazon). So you can still vote to avoid Amazon and choose a Adobe reader (not B&N!), where the DRM feature is at least licensed to multiple hardware manufacturers and stores, and is much easier to work around (Topaz books from Amazon are pretty harsh, but MobiPocket isn't a very good format for alternative reading systems either, even if you've stripped the DRM).