Although I have not done any independent research yet, but I am thinking based on the number of reports I am seeing here that Apples negotiation with the publishers may have ended up with a deal where they require the publisher to sell without DRM (and not just where apple is concerned). I commented on this previously (either in this thread or another, similar thread) and I think it makes sense. Now I know that Apple is considered the king of controlling a market through DRM; however, hear me out.
When Apple went after digital music files, there was not really much in the way of another legal distribution channel for it. There fore, getting in on the ground floor, proprietary DRM made the music industry feel secure and made it so only their devices played the files. This, plus making a better portable music player than anyone else at the time, allowed them to get a very large presence in that market before the market was very large.
The ebook reader market is different. There are already fairly entrenched players in this market and 2 of them have been selling DRM'ed ebooks that are not readable on other readers for years(I am counting B&N here even though they are relatively new to the market, since they bought up older companies and are supporting a file format not supported by almost any other reading device). It would be like Virgin records and one or two other music sellers had their own music players and sold proprietary files to be played on those devices but the devices were not functional enough or inexpensive enough to create a large market for them. Since this is the case for the ebook reader market, it makes sense for Apple to fight for no DRM to help even the playing field. In addition, they likely have numbers to indicate that sales of music are better since DRM was removed from that media and they offer the publishers the ability to set their own price for ebooks in addition to that (No matter how much an industry does not like their work to be pirated, if there is strong evidence to indicate there are in fact, not just a theory more sales without DRM that is what matters. Because at the end of the day it is sales that matter.) And Apple is in a unique position to be able to show this since no other sellers of ebooks have sold both DRMed and non-DRMed music. So DRM becomes a non issue. Effectively leveling the playing field. Add to this possible strategy the fact that Apple is using ebub (even touting it as the "open standard" in the keynote for the iPad) and not using the Adobe SDK (or B&N's encryption that will be included in adobe in the future). They could be going for proprietary DRM, increasing confusion in the market (I believe this would benefit Amazon the most) or they could be making a move to remove DRM across the board so that any device that can read a format will be able to since there will not be any DRM and customers will not have to do anything illegal to shift an ebook from a format that their reader cannot read to one that it can.
Sorry for the long post, but that is my two cents on the subject at this point
