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Even though I know where there are free ebooks, I would spend money on a lot more ebooks if there was a reliable, non-DRMd, format available with prices like paperbacks, i.e. books with a format that I could believe would always be around. Actually, even zipped HTML or RTF would suffice for my purposes.
Most of the thousands of dollars I've spent on paper over the years (but not all) would have probably been spent on e-books.
For books that are not available commercially in an appropriate form, there will probably always be people bending the rules. Most will try to ensure they are paying one way or another, e.g. by making sure they are buying a lot of similar paper books, or by paying for the same paper book before downloading a pirated copy of an ebook.
But for perceived price gauging (whether real or not), or unavailable ebooks, or moving an ebook to a new device, people are probably always going to treat a strict copyright law sort of like the speed limit. Most want to obey the spirit of the law, but might not exactly stay perfectly within the limits. I think the industry would do well to focus on those customers instead of ruining the whole industry because they are so worried about the fringe element that will take everything for free and never buy an ebook.
Book sellers might even be surprised at how much additional revenue they can get even from those people, because even the typical "freeloader" is likely to occassionally buy a few books, or grow into a stable income and start becoming buyers.
If someone is dead set on not buying any e-books, there's no revenue lost, is there? So why work so hard on the set of people that are irrelevant to the market, and in doing so reduce the legit market to almost nothing? I just don't think that's wise or good for anyone, and if the laws need to change to support greater flexibility for fair use, I sure hope we can find a way to counter the power and influence of the publishers on content owners.
Of course, DRM is not about pirates. It's about shifting the market from purchase of content to rental of content under very strict usage constraints. Content owners would like to control when and how you use the content, and make you pay accordingly. That, however, would not seem to be in the public interest to have that happen. I don't want to end up paying once to see a show or read a book on Tue, Oct 3 from 8-9pm on e-ink device #345123476454 and only when my fingerprint is registered by the device thumbprint reader while I read the book. Then pay again for the priviledge of reading the book again Sun am on a different device, but at a higher rate because people prefer to read on Sundays, and the device has the potential of letting someone read over my shoulder also. That's the sort of thing that advanced DRM allows. Not more flexibility, but more control. And that's what the fight is really all about. Maybe we won't see it to that level, but the choice becomes entirely up to the content owner.
Some say that the content owner owns the content so he/she should be able to determine how it's used. But that protection in copyright law is only there for the public good, not to increase powers of the content owners. The basic idea is about incentives to keep authors writing new books, lest all creative works shrivel up and die. In the days of the original laws, it was a very real risk that no one would be able to afford to publish a book. Now I can publish an ebook for free. It's a different world. So why does copyright law keep getting strengthened? Politics, pure and simple.
Movies and books protections should probably expire after 5 or 10 years or so. Might we lose a few authors due to financial losses. Maybe. Maybe not. I'd like to know what portion of the revenue stream comes after 10 years for books that aren't huge revenue books (those that might not be written without the extra revenues). The laws are supposed to support the public good. Are they doing it right now?
Okay, enough, in fact too much... <me getting down off my soapbox>...
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