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E-book is definitively threatening current copyright paradigm.
You used to pay the author's royalties when you actually purchased the physical book. The new ebook industry tries to adapt this paradigm by charging royalties when you buy the electronic version of the book.
When we have a media (the Internet) that allows millions of users to instantly share files, all traditional copyright system falls apart. It's illegal _yet_ but I believe publishers and legislators throughout the world will understand that the current system is dead and all efforts to keep it alive as it was before the 1990s are just a loss of effort and resources. The hundreds of millions of web users will just rip off all traditional copyright efforts.
But without copyright there's no cultural production. Professional writers will just stop writing since their work is not going to be profitable anymore. So in order to keep the industry alive, both publishers and authors have to learn how to use file-sharing in their favour. One tip: people like "free". So if they can find a way of giving people contents for free while still getting authors payed they will discover the wheel (copyfree).
The only reason we still have room for trying to keep the traditional "pay for it" paradigm is that ereading devices are not mass producted yet. When they will, you won't bother buying electronic versions of books, you'll just download them all from your favourite P2P.
Another thing that bothers me is DMR. You can nowadays read the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible. But will you be able to read a DMRed ebook in 100 years from now? I don't think so...
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