[bmfrosty]

@Steve

The hassle and promise of hassle of having to deal with DRM will bring a legitimate purchaser to look for alternate sources for their eBooks, and when they find that they can get them easily for free they stop buying. The free alternative will have it's own hassles, but they're almost all certainly smaller than the ones they encounter dealing with bad DRM.

It's not about what's right and what's wrong. It's about human nature.

eBooks are still in their relative infancy, and it's possible that the slippery slope that the music industry fell down might be still be avoided, and Amazon may even have a partial solution. They need to stop messing around. They've canceled books that they've already sold. They're killing off the production of new readers that work with DRM'd mobi. They've set up a system where they're now one of many formats and one of many forms of DRM. You can't buy a device that naively works with it all. They're sending a message to consumers and that message is that if you buy into DRM, you'll eventually be left out in the cold.

I think when it all comes to a head, the publishers will be left out in the cold by their customer's distaste for DRM that's only effective enough to make legitimate customers miserable.

Edit: Oh awesome. I just realized that a bunch of my old purchases from fictionwise are now multiformat. I may have to start buying from them again. Maybe I'll resubscribe to asimov's and analog.