[Worldwalker]

I'm a re-reader, which I suppose makes a great deal of difference. And I'm willing to deny myself pleasure when I believe that the social cost of that pleasure -- in this case, encouraging the use of DRM -- is too great.

Another difference is in the effects of the things you listed. It's not unreasonable to have to show you are eligible for a government-issued ID before it can be issued to you. Security cameras don't stop you from doing anything, and while they might not stop someone from holding up a convenience store (or you, for that matter) they make it a lot easier to nail the guy who did it, which, as little as I like public surveillance, I have to admit is a significant benefit. Likewise the anti-theft strips in items and their corresponding sensors at the doors. None of those are directed at me personally, and none of them hamper my use of any associated product or service. In some cases, they're potentially quite beneficial to me individually, such as having a way to catch someone if I get mugged in the Wal-Mart parking lot or something.

Digital Restrictions Management, on the other hand, is directed at me personally. It says "You, Worldwalker, are not someone we can trust with this ebook." It puts significant restrictions on my normal, ordinary use of the item I just bought, and that's not even getting into things like first-sale doctrine. It's much more intrusive, and much more personally directed, than a security camera in a store or a buzzer in a library.

There's also the purpose of it. It doesn't stop illicit copying, and every publisher knows that. People have been copying books without permission since they had to use a quill pen to do it. Its purpose, and its function, is to support device lock-in. If you have a library of books for your Kindle, for instance, and the Kindle stops working, you can't go buy a Nook instead; you have to buy another Kindle. That's the real purpose of DRM, the one the publishers and booksellers don't talk about. They're not losing money to "piracy", and they know they're not (if that were the case, Baen Books would have gone bankrupt years ago). Publishers want to sell you multiple copies of the same book, and much more important, bookstores that are tied to hardware (Sony, Amazon, B&N, etc.) want to make sure you can't buy their competitors' hardware, at least not without the prohibitive cost of replacing all your books (which would of course delight the publishers).

By the way, it's not you BJ's is checking on, or at least not entirely you; it's their own employees. Think about it: what, really, could you add to your cart between the register and the door? One of the major sources of loss for retailers is cashiers who "miss" an item or two in a friend's cart, and that's who they're really trying to nail.