ebook DRM horrors

Teleread's David Rothman makes this extremely salient point about what happens when DRM-protected ebooks go on the blink:

Shouldn't you be able to buy e-books for real--and be able to display the books on different machines or make useful backups without violating the DMCA? ...

Daniel P. Smith, a veteran member of the eBook Community list who bought hundreds of dollars of content keyed to just one machine. And guess what? It recently went on the blink and soon may be kaput for keeps. Here's what Daniel Smith wrote to someone curious about the popularity of various DRMed formats.

Just for the record: the Rocket eBook/Gemstar .rb is very, very unpopular with this member of the reading public due to the fact that it was proprietary, and the proprietor elected to go out of the eBook business.

A month ago, my eBook device suddenly said something about file corruption and stopped working. I pushed the "reset" key, reinstalled the firmware updates, and reinstalled my books and everything seems fine, but I can see the handwriting on the wall. If this device ever fails, I believe that the chances of getting access to the $500-odd worth of books I've bought for it--at the same prices as dead-tree versions--are essentially zilch, as they're keyed to the hardware serial number of the device.

The stuff people say about DRM and proprietary formats is not theoretical. It can happen and it basically has happened to me. My eBooks, which cost exactly as much as the dead-tree equivalents, appear to have had a useful life of about five years.

I am not going to touch DRMed stuff again with a five-foot pole, no matter how attractive or nicely engineered the reading device is, unless the DRM is as deliberately porous as Apple's Fairplay.

... e-books are still a long way from being as consumer-friendly as they should be. This is no small reason why e-book sales are a fraction of what they were predicted to be by now. I myself have yet to buy my first DRMed book except for the dictionary I use with Mobipocket. Promotional freebies from Microsoft and the rest? Yes, I'll download 'em. Same for commercial e-books without DRM. But I'll not "buy" books that I can't even be certain I'll own for real.