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There seem to be two ancestors to the current DRM & ebook problem -- DRM & software and DRM & music.
Going back only as far as the 1980s for the software side, publishers have used serial numbers, branding, key disks (where there were physical alterations to the master disk to tell that it was not a normal disk), motherboard serial number embedding, remote verification (through call-in or Internet), and key devices (aka donagals) to name but a few. All fail. In the early wave of software for the PC it was a common practice for a user to enter their serial number and name and the software would then "brand" the program with thei name. (This was an early version of Elsi's social DRM.) I remember going to a client site one day and seeing an accounting program identified as belonging to "Morgan the Pirate."
The only ones hurt by this DRM & software are the legal users of the programs. As anyone who has been to Asia will tell you, bootlegs are sold openly and for a fraction of the cost we pay in the US for the same program. I am still waiting for responses from several publishers who seem to think I am a pirate because I wish to reinstall my wife's software after her hard disk failed. Another program goes out to the Internet to verify the serial number. The only problem is that the publisher has gone out of business and I cannot find out who (if anyone) picked up the title.
Music and DRM has an equally unseemly history. At the start all music had a built-in self destruct as the physical act of playing the records degraded the signal quality resulting in harsh sounds, pops, and crackles. (Not to mention the ever popular skip.) However, if I changed from a Dual to a JBL turntable, the record still worked. When they offered the music on tape, the tape could stretch or break over time but I could play it on my JCV or Sony deck. More recently they offered music on CDs that could also be played on many different decks. When they went to digital formats we got locked into a single deck. Even the famous "Plays for Sure" multiplatofrm music DRM from Microsoft has been left in the dust.
Since the dawn of consumer digital music there have always been (the old) Nabster-like darknet offerings for bootleg non-DRM music. Apple's iStore thrived. They dropped DRM and sold even more. Where did these extra sales come from? Their sales increase was larger than the growth of the total music market so the sales came from either people who formerly pirated their music or from people that would not buy on-line music before (but would buy the CD and create their own digital versions.)
Now on to price. A good accountant can make any outcome you want to see a reality. The cost of the outcome is directly related to how obtuse the result has to be. Therefore, let's concentrate on the marginal cost of that next book. Book number 5,001 from a press run of 5,000 hardbound copies.
For the digital book, the cost is mainly the royality fee to the writer and the license fee for the DRM. (I'm not sure which is higher.) For the hardcover it would mean sending it back for another print run so unless there is a great deal of demand, the chances are slim that it would ever happen. If it was copy 3,723, then the marginal costs of the hardcover book are lower as everything has already been paid for (there is just a small amount less that you will not chargeback against the writer's advance.)
If DRM books had represented a brand name of sorts where we were assured that they were of a higher quality (fewer typos, etc) they may have had a chance. They did not. I find more errors in DRM offerings from Sony than I do in Baen or Project Gutenberg. I find the fewest errors in the Dickens books from Harry at our own MobileRead download section.
If we go five years down the road and look back, I think we will see DRM far in the mists of the past.
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