Hello there,
My opinion.
Living in Spain, it is impossible for a guy to buy books from Sony. He won't have a warranty either. The solution for e-books seems to pass by buying some .lit, if available, and then hack the DRM and convert it via Calibre or similar.
These companies have to be kidding. The best, fastest and most efficient way to get a book nowadays, for a guy around here, is emule or similar. Yep, not legal (not illegal either, depending where), but when it is not a matter of paying, but of going crazy in the process of getting to read certain book and achieving it, emule is a straight forward solution. And that is the only way when the books you want to read are unavailable at shops straight away (try to buy e-books in Spanish, for example).
Search for a book, download it, edit, convert it and read it. One wouldn't mind if paying was in the process. What can they expect when getting the book for free is so much easier and faster than buying it? Are they dumb? Are we dumb?
About the copyright and the illegality of this, as much as we can find it fair to pay for it once, it is not so fair when you buy something a 2nd time. Many of us bought LPs then cassettes (for my car) then CDs of the same album and no company refunded us a single cent, when we should just have paid the value of the hardware. we bought VHS and then DVD, the same. We have books repeated in paperback and hard cover and if we want to have the e-book we have to pay again as though it was the first time.
I tell you plainly, many people will buy when they make it easy, comfortable and add some extra value to my paying. They will never pay twice for the same piece of info, specially if it is digital, and they will care about the companies' rights when they care about ours. We seem to accept that the customer is the weak end of the equation and we jump once and again through the fire ring whenever they say hop. Well, that is not so.
This people don't care if Borders keeps their rewards, if Sony and Amazon have non compatible documents so they have to stick to one of them. They don't care for buying and de-DRMing when they can get un-DRM'd for free and faster. These companies are like vultures using, abusing, and ignoring their main source of income, their customers.
Don't get me wrong, I have been years spending my weekend pay in reading, and later on it has been my main stable expenditure. I buy paper essays regularly and a couple of p-books every month. The essays are for me. The books are for my wife. I am an active customer. And will be. But I am so astonished at the effort you people make to actually pay for the books...
The day they tell us we can buy a book once, error free (which they are not now), fully editable (except contents), and that we can download it in any format, any time and as many times as we care to, all this people will consider buying.
In the meantime, only if they can't help it.
In Spain there is a canon on DVDs, CDs VHSs and Cassettes. In case you might plan on recording some copyrighted material onto these platforms, they charge you with a quantity of money. You are paying copyrights for your own Holidays pictures. It is simply preposterous. Again, copying a book, LP or DVD is not illegal if not done for making money.
Well, that is my point of view of all this, more or less.