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I have to disagree. The ebooks are the software. You buy Photoshop, World Of Warcraft, Final Cut, but you don't expect any of those to work on the system they were not designed for. The data is the output of your interaction with the software. In photoshop it's a .psd file, with reading it's your memory of the book.
If you owned a paper copy of a book in English, and all of a sudden the world only spoke and wrote in japanese, would you feel like English was a DRM system that was not future proof?
There are two reasons I am really not up in arms about DRM
1.) I am young. I have grown up with computers and fast changing technology and (like I said earlier) don't expect anything but my memories of my interactions with previous technology to be relevant 3 - 4 years from now. I still have software I wrote on 5 1/4 " disks that I can't use on anything but the original machines it was designed for, and I really don't care as I still own the disk (as worthless as it may be) and I still have the memories of the fun I had designing the software. That is my data.
2.) Even if there is a major shift in DRM or encoding practices, the original machines will still be around. If you look for it you can find a BetaMax player, hook it up to an old television and still watch the DRM Beta tapes you bought into. If Amazon folds, you can find a kindle, some extra batteries, and pull the books off your SD card. The fact that it works now means that ownership is guaranteed for as long as you have the ability to recreate the environment.
Being put off that it wont work in a spectacularly new environment, again, just seems silly.
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