@apprenticeharper: DRM is harmful to consumer/user/public interests. It gets used as a lock in for ecosystems, the restrictions it produces are entirely artificially created.
DRM removal in any case becomes necessary at some point "down the road" - heck it is the first thing even I recommend everyone should do after purchasing a "reading license" for the price of an ebook. (In germany you aren't allowed to sell eBooks at a lower price point than paper editions to "protect booksellers as a commercial sector" (from getting outmuscled by "economies of scale"...)
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I dont care about the "we have to be able to sell you a better version, a few years from now" argument, I don't even care about the "there is no wear and tear on it" argument. No you can't use DRM to establish them by having people agree to those limitations.
But it is arguable (I have never argued for it in my life - I just see the following as a somewhat relevant point), that you need some "modality" to prevent "ubiquitous sharing" out of the gate. Also - from my POV water marking is a worse way to realize this - because it is essentially criminalizing individuals for not being able to rule out the behavior of their peers, which in return leads to self censored behavior.
Please understand that I share your believes entirely - but this is more than a DRM discussion, this is a discussion about the point when DRM in itself becomes just another layer, because the restrictive functions are woven into the fileformat to begin with.
("kfx is only readable on proprietary hardware, thats always connected, not owned by the user, firmware updates install without your consent and so on..").
I'd happily agree to a DRM layer (if it becomes removable over time, and only then) any day - if we could keep books in fileformats that people out there arent disallowed to understand, produce, or sell.
Its the difference between "you loose this features because of an artificial layer" and "you loose them because its an ebook". Its the difference between "the author/publisher chooses to restrict his work" and "the author/publisher can't create the final book, not if he wants all those premium features".
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@latepaul: It is hard to believe in the collective power of individual choice (changing your own buying behavior), when the issue itself doesnt get publicised (the blogger scene didn't care to inform their readers in the least), when Amazon was able to roll out the format change over night - not informing consumers what had changed (apart from "more bookerly") and the only way to opt out (one book at a time) is so unpractical that the majority of consumers will never use it.
My argument actually is about the moment you loose most of the element of choice you bring forward as the thing thats still out there and in our favor - when most of your library (on the device) has already been converted to a format you can't take with you. kfx as a lock in - if you like. All of this - as of right now - is established and ongoing.
Also - there is the structural element, that if you allow a distributor to inhabit all "ebook production" rights (structural change, and be it "just for the most popular format") within his ecosystem, and there is no noticeable pushback -- other competitors will follow the same model. It's like passing up opportunity if you dont (If authors and publishers want to give up their rights to still be able to produce the actual product...).
@Cinisajoy: Trying to define an eBook as something even a bannerad would qualify for - if there was enough text on it, is something that could only come out of your mouth at this point.. All you did for the last five pages in this posting is to proclaim that "you are not convinced" and that we should move on - because "hating kfx is so yesterdays news, I mean cmon..."
Sure - eBooks dont have to be conceptually "bound" to be written in HTML for all the foreseeable future - but to keep them in an "easy to understand, easy to produce" open (and be it via reverse engineering) standard is necessary to keep important properties of books as a cultural medium.
Something everyone with some interest can start creating themselves. Thats the "you have to keep the means to create them distributed" part of the argument.
.kfx marks the moment when this stopped being the case for the main Kindle file format. Rollout was overnight, Amazon didn't care to inform their customers, bloggers didn't care to inform their users, production tools suddenly werent distributed - and hackers chose not to release the creation tools, because the file format stopped being "fit for archiving" on the users side ("No calibre for you!").
And Amazon should be allowed to do all of this without too much public attention, because...? (Bloggers get paid by banner ads...? *sarcasm*)