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I think pirating enabled music to do away with DRM . Music is/was relatively easy to pirate. Stripping DRM for music didn't seem that difficult. As a consumer, if you don't sell me what I want (DRM free music) than I'll just get it for free the way I want. That puts pressure on the producer to cave in and do away with DRM as well as provide better quality products.
I find it ironic that DRM was made to stop pirating but it appears that pirating is the reason that you can now find DRM free music being sold.
We aren't seeing that with ebooks because books are relatively hard to pirate since they are more difficult to digitalize/rip compared to music. So there isn't as much pressure for the publishers to get rid of DRM or even offer a good product. Look at all those poorly formatted ebooks out there for sale with all the typos.
The only way I see it happening is if people band together and stopped purchasing both paper and ebook versions of books whose ebooks are DRMed. If enough people dislike something and agree to stop buying the item for those reasons, companies will get the hint. Companies tend to listen when their profit margins fall. However, getting enough people to band together to do this will probably not happen so I believe DRM books will continue to exist for quite some time.
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