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This announcement of beefing up Kindle ebooks DRM strength seems to me to tie in with the announcement of Amazon "renting" textbooks. To get publishers on board, Amazon has to be able to convince the publishers that students won't be able to rent one copy, strip the DRM & expiration mechanism, and then share one copy among an entire class. Or strip the DRM and start an "used" ebook market similar to that of pbooks. For this plan, Amazon would need to develop DRM strong enough or hidden enough to withstand cracking (remember how long it took to crack Topaz?) or to have DRM whose mechanism could be changed without warning (like the new releases of K4PC).
I see this as a serious move to establish a secure ebook textbook market. Just contemplate what students now pay for pbook textbooks.
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