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DRM on ebooks threatens not just the idea of personal ownership but indeed breaks the very idea of what a "book" has always meant ever since incunabula publishers moved to, well, movable type. Because of its production technique a book has always been cheap enough to be afforded and has always been able to be shared between friends. It has always had both an intrinsic value as well as an artistic value, and adds to it a resale value. The DRM'd books on Amazon and elsewhere steal ownership from readers just as sincerely as publishers fear readers will steal content. Because publishers are now in control the poor consumer must dance to their lock-step tune. But as the internet and other forms of information access become ever more powerful publishers may well find that they cannot control access in this manner and risk making consumers so angry they will become thieves out of spite as well as out of need. For we need only look at how technology has changed the face of email -- from amber letters on a black CRT run by slash-commands and intricate keystrokes to black on paper-white run by a few mouseclicks that most grandparents can learn. So right now to remove DRM means the one must learn at least the rudiments of a language like Python and be enough of a techie to brave Terminal mode. But in a year or less I would suspect that widely available will be GUI-intensive solutions that will remove DRM like a snake sheds its skin. Point-click-freedom. So if I was a publisher I would ask what model I should follow given this? The Baen Library model of freely publishing ebooks to supplement print? Or the Amazon model of greedily holding everything close? Which type of model will tommorrow's consumer show appreciation for having been on the receiving end? I know how I'll act should someone come up with a reader equivalent to my otherwise beloved Kindle that has a store without DRM that offers many choices. Or how I'll cleave back to Amazon if they wake up with the Kindle 3. Meanwhile I would never have bought a Kindle and put up with the DRM but, heck, even this grandpa still had enough brain cells to learn Python. Technology has to stop lagging trust.
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