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DRM doesn't work to stop piracy of books. DRM will never work to stop piracy of books. DRM can never work to stop piracy of books. The biggest problem in piracy is torrent sites and websites that host pirated materials. In both cases, it is not sufficient to merely stop some cases of piracy (i.e., the casual person who simply wants to send the file to a friend), it is necessary to stop the hard core pirates.
DRM software for books essentially is a cryptographic system where the cypher text, the plain text and the key must all be available to the end user. At most all that remains is for the attacker to reverse engineer the cryptographic system... probably by far the easiest step in breaking a cryptographic system (i.e., in the history of cryptography, finding out what system was used was always the easy part).
But even assuming that the cryptographic system could not be broken, there is nothing to stop the dedicated pirate from scanning the work in question, or even typing it in manually; it may seem like a lot of work, but I bet a skilled typist could type most any novel in less than a week.
Therefore, since DRM will never live up to its stated reason for being, it is evil and should go away.
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Bill
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