I'll try a new approach to this discussion, maybe a summing up from what was teached to me in the last years (mixed with my own intrepetation and addons)
What they teach you nowadays in economics 101 is they seperate "wares" into 4 rough catagories. While as a ware they understand virtually everything that matters to humanity (including services and so on)
The first separation lines, if the wares are consumed when used (like an apple), or if they are usable without consuming (like as case in point here "texts")
The second separation line is, if you can exclude people from using a ware or if you can't.
So the first quadrant are wares that are consuming and are excludeable, this is just the normal everyday product. This is what economy original was about, or at least concentrated upon, and this is also where are free market economy works best with.
The second quadrant is a rather strange category, that is consuming and non-excludable. Its almost empty, also possibly because we haven't been able to come up with any system that works well with that category. City-traffic is in cases the streets get too full such a thing. You cannot or will not exclude people from using a street, altough everyone uses up a slot when taking... (in cases of highways in some countries they are actually excluding people who are not willing to pay the fee)
The third quadrant are "club goods". That is they don't consume on use, but you can exclude people from using it. There we have subscriptions that work pretty well. Private-TV is such a case, the signal is encoded, and as long you do not subscribe you are excluded to see it (except you criminally break into that exclusion).
The forth quadrant are "public goods". That is they don't consome on use, and you cannot exclude people from using it. This is where the state comes in. Usually you are legally enforced to pay your contribution to this "wares" if you want or not (also called "taxes") "National security" is such a thing. Not consumed upon use, and you cannot in any way exclude somebody who is not willing to pay his part for national military.
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Now books for sale, traditionally they have been treated as "normal products". Slowly consuming upon use (at one part they just fall apart). And you definitely can exclude people from having a paper book if they do not want to pay for it.
The library is somehow a mix of a club ware and a public ware. Club ware, because you have to pay subscription fees to be able to use it. Public ware, because they are usually havily funded by the state, and you pay for them by taxes regardless if you ever want to use the library or not.
As you can see on the quadrant our current economic system does differently well on different quadrants. It works best on normal goods, okay on club goods, public goods are usually troublesome (well everbody knows how ineffective and cost ineffecient public services can be...) and worst on consumable non-exclusive ware (its so bad we havent got any).
Now the whole Idea of DRM is to move or keep the text industry in another quadrant as it would normally fall under without "exclusion technologies".
With eBooks they try to either make them consumable products, by strictly convining them to single device with DRMs, and when the device is broken your copy is gone also. Understandable they try it, but this just doesn't go well with people. I personally wouldn't want such a deal.
Now when you say the "jini is so far out of the bottle", we cant impossible have any working exclusion technology, then it will fall under the public quadrant. That is the only way that remotly works we know we can produce in this quadrant is by public funding. That is an author gets paid if some goverment instution decides he is worth it. Thats by the way how authorship worked in the communistic states... I mean to say it didn't work at all would not be true, but it didn't remotly work as well as the system we had so far. It would likely make the books into the same quality category as public (goverment paid) TV. Which is quite horrible in most countries, but germany tops it all
Now what we still could and IMHO should hope for is that we succeed to make texts "club goods". The electronic library would be such a thing. Or generally you pay once for the text, and can use it as often you want. Or you pay generally a subscription fee for a given publisher... Or a given author. That way many scientific journals work. Not because hardly anybody ever buys it, but many scientific institutions have standing subscription to the publisher. Thats is not only quite well for a reader, who only pays a subscription fee for "all you can read", its also a dream scenario for publishers and authors, who know in advance a new title will get its targets. Only if a publisher/author gets worse over a given time, you will kill your subscription at some point....