Citing an e-book horror story in the TeleBlog as one example, Rob Beschizza writes in the Gadget Blog at Wired News:
“After years of hype, e-books may yet be the next big thing. Even with decent handsets (like the Sony’s Reader…) and stabler standards, however, it’s a technology tainted by a history of aggressive DRM. Of all the things you’d expect to have gone mobile by now, the humble book still lags behind news, magazines, music and video. If digital takeup is any guide to health, literature is the sick man of media.
“The why of that has many faces, but DRM plays its part. Taking a historically commonplace form of expression, freely portable in its traditional format, and turning it into an ephemeral, hardware-specific, proprietary service? Well, it must have been an interesting job ad: ‘Hand-wringing villains required for commercial appropriation of timeless cultural institutions: apply within.'”
