[bgalbrecht]

A decade or more ago, there used to be at least one usenet feed where people posted ebook versions scanned from paper. I looked at a few, they usually were pretty bad, scanned but poorly proofread. After the publishers finally gave up and started selling ebooks of all of their catalog, I think the feeds morphed into ebooks from cracked DRM. If the publishers were to switch to a DRM system that is much harder to crack, I suspect that most DRM breakers would switch to whatever retailer(s) sell versions that are still breakable and they would not go back to scanning.

It would take a long time to switch. Amazon, B&N and Kobo probably sell a lot of their ebooks to consumers with ereaders that they don't sell anymore, and switching to a DRM still that those ereaders can't read would cause a lot of bad press and unhappy customers who might chose to buy a reader from a different walled garden instead of upgrading.

Macmillan and Baen aren't the only ones to go DRM-free. Simon & Schuster's Saga SF line did too. Macmillan seems to be more concerned about libraries, they added a 6 month window between publication date and ebooks available from libraries.

I think that if B&N gives up on the Nook, they'll do what Sony did, and sell the customer base to Kobo. Even if Kobo only gives them a pittance, it's better than shutting down without anything to show for it.