@polly: excellent reply. To add a bit: DRM is today's attempt to do the same thing lotus and others tried to do in the 80's: prevent people from making fair use of something purchased (and yes, impede piracy). Back then, each time a vendor tried some new copy protection, someone else would figure out how to circumvent it. The same thing is true today: the publishers try to lock down ebooks, and someone, somewhere, gets annoyed and breaks the protection. Unfortunately, the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) makes it a crime to provide details for how the DRM is stripped, so one must look for sites overseas to get information about how to do it. I wonder if it will take publishers as long as it took companies like Amazon and Apple iTunes to give up on such silliness.
@petey: there are a few publishers that sell DRM-free books. My favorite is the scifi publisher Baen (
http://www.webscription.net/). Baen provides the books DRM-free, and they politely ask people to be reasonable and honest with them, a philosophy that very much appeals to me. In addition, for $15 each month one gets a 'webscription' consisting of 7 books from a mix of known and new authors. I buy from Baen frequently.