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Shecky,
What you have missed is DRM. Its proponents call it "digital rights management"; its opponents call it "digital restrictions management". You'll find me in the latter camp, as you might guess from my .sig.
The purpose of DRM is to restrict a book you buy (or get free) from being read except under the extremely limited circumstances defined by the publisher or bookseller. This generally means that it is strictly locked to a single reading device, or sometimes a small number of them, and cannot be reformatted, printed, read out loud, loaned, sold like a used book, or, well, pretty much anything else. For example, if I were to buy a book at the Sony store for my PRS-505, it could only be read on that specific 505. If I stepped on my 505 tomorrow and bought a Kindle to replace it, I'd have to buy a new ebook.
Except, of course, that I don't buy DRM-locked ebooks. The only vote I have is my wallet, and though it is a tiny vote indeed, I will not use it to vote against my own best interest, and that of my fellow readers. I buy books from DRM-free stores (Baen, BookView Cafe, O'Reilly, etc.). I buy books directly from clueful authors. I read a lot of public domain books -- not just the great classics, but all sorts of nifty books that have been overlooked by many, not to mention the pulps that are now out of copyright. I'm never short of reading material. Just what I have loaded right now will get me through the next 10 years at my current reading speed (though admittedly some, such as the Sherlock Holmes canon, are re-reads).
The proponents of DRM will tell you that they know you're a thief, and therefore DRM is necessary to prevent you from "stealing" their books -- that is, making illicit copies of them. That is utter baloney. People who want to make illicit copies of books will do so if they have to buy a physical copy and scan it -- and they do, on a regular basis. What it's really about is device lock-in. If you have a Sony Reader, for example, you have to buy from the Sony store; you can't buy books from Amazon or B&N and read them on it. So you can't buy some other brand of ebook reader and still be able to read your books. The publishers like it because that means you'll have to buy the same books all over again (and generally at outrageous prices); the device sellers like it because you have to buy your next reader, and the one after that, from them and only them. The only one who loses is ... you. Well, and the authors whose books you couldn't buy because they weren't available for your device, or because you had to spend your book budget on replacing ebooks that, due to device changes, format changes, or whatever, you still have but can no longer read.
As for Calibre: It's an ebook library management program, format converter, and several other very wonderful things. It won't solve your problem -- your problem is DRM. But it will make the Sony Library software look fairly pathetic by comparison. Like many people whose primary books sources are free (public domain books) or from DRM-free sellers (which tend to be cheaper), I have thousands of ebooks. Just keeping them organized would be a nightmare without Calibre.
As for stripping DRM, it's against forum policy to discuss it -- it could get the kind people who run MR sued -- but Google is your friend.
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