DMGeBooks, and Why Nobody's Reading Them
Science fiction author Cory Doctorow pointed to an excellent (if freewheeling) essay by Charlie Stross on Why the commercial ebook market is broken. The essay touches on why the eBook market is withering on the vine, and why the publishing industry has little to fear from piracy.
In the pre-internet dark age, there was a subculture of folks who would get their hands on books and pass them around and encourage people to read them for free, rather than buying their own copies. Much like today's ebook pirates, in terms of the what they did (with one or two minor differences). There was a closely-related subculture who would actually sell copies of books without paying the authors a penny in royalties, too.
We have a technical term for such people: we call them "librarians" and "second-hand bookstore owners".
Stross neatly skewers most of the publishing industry's misguided arguments in favor of DRM and their unreasoning panic over piracy.