Why Your (e) Books Are No Longer Yours
An interesting article, Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours that reviews a recent legal review of ebook vendor's legal agreements and ownership of the 'books' they sell.
In short, as a DRM'd ebook buyer, you're really entering a rental, rather than ownership agreement, and Amazon, Sony et al should frame the transaction as such.
There is another issue about the transfer of an ebook - books can easily and legimately passed on, because the book is the container technology in and of itself, whereas an ebook is seperated from it's display technology.
Personally, I think the fact that books are consumable within their own, cheap technology of bound paper, and all the primary interface benefits and secondary market opportunities this brings, means books will last a lot longer than naysayers predict.
Compare books, say to CDs, where the disc is simply a transport mechanism.
There's a fairly interesting dicussion in the comment thread (tip; just read the multi-line comments to ignore the chatter) as well.
