[Taylor514ce]

Ah, now I understand. Thanks. Sorry, moz, I was just dense.

Understand I'm talking about a theory only, and in this ideal theory, DRM would disappear, and all book publishers would agree, if not on a format, at least on an encryption infrastructure. Thus any software developer, including third parties, could publish a reader application that supported "e-book encryption". If you don't like one reader application, use a different one.

The reader app doesn't matter. The encryption scheme is public, which doesn't matter either. The strength of public key encryption is that the encryption method is known and the encryption keys are public. The power of the method is that it still requires a private key to decrypt a file. So, anyone could build a decrypting reader application. The e-book publisher cannot lock you into a device or application. They can only lock the book to your public key. The encryption method is not secret, the app isn't secret. The only secret is your private key.

Keep in mind the goal of this system isn't to prevent piracy, a technological impossibility. It's a system to key a book to a person, which is analogous to a person walking into a store and picking a copy of a book off a shelf and buying it, with the additional goal of providing a reasonable degree of protection against casual copying.