Can someone point out to Pogue that the music industry is, in fact, tanking?
Piracy is almost certainly one cause, though it is unclear if DRM is having a positive or negative effect on the music industry as a whole. The trends do not seem to indicate that dropping DRM has actually had any effect on digital sales, for example.
I also don't think the music industry quite maps to books. Record companies released their music in an unprotected digital format for decades (CD's), so it's a snap to rip and share out the entire back catalog. Books don't have that problem, and while the fanatical Harry Potter fans may be willing to scan and exhaustively proofread and format their infringing copies, I'm not sure the same can be said for obscure book titles. I.e. you aren't going to have the same critical mass of available pirated copies as you did with music.
So it is at least possible that DRM will be a little more effective with books than with music, though it may be impossible to every truly determine such a complicated question.
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Originally Posted by HansTWN
There really is no reasonable objection to watermarking I can think of, unless one plans to upload the file to a file server.
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They'll likely use watermarking if they ditch the DRM, at least that's what Apple does (not sure about Amazon with MP3's). Of course, it'd be trivially easy to strip a watermark from an unprotected file, so I don't know how that would be much of a deterrent.