DRM has turned the e-reader market into winner takes all, so now we are dealing with the natural consequences: market consolidation, lack of innovation, lack of price competition, anti-consumer features. And at the user side, people are now vested on their platforms, and thus want them to be the winner.

I don't think your argument here really follows.

DVDs have DRM, streamed content has DRM, and yet neither of those markets have monopolies.

The fact that Amazon has a proprietary format has more impact on market structure than the fact that the format has DRM.

Your DVD doesn't lock to your DVD player with it's DRM, and streamed content doesn't lock to your browser.

eBooks DRM locks it the reader, however.

Hence my point that the issue is not DRM.

Even DRM that locks content to your account, e.g. iTunes did not result in a monopoly.

> e.g. iTunes did not result in a monopoly

I'll have to disagree.

Well, technically, when there is more than one it's called an oligopoly...

There are many books (atleast technical books) that come in pdf format with watermarking but no DRM.

PDF is a file format that is largely meant for enterprise documents. Books aren't files to begin with.

Those same companies (Informit by Pearson, Manning, Packt, etc) also provide the files in epub and mobi format. Again with just watermarks.

To an extent, those drawbacks can be mitigated by software, namely Calibre[0]. There may be alternatives out there, but this is the particular piece of software I use. I'll do my best to address your concerns here. (N.B. I don't develop this software, nor am I paid to advertise it; I just like it and want to demonstrate some of its features here)

While most books that I own are hard-copy, I have an old Kindle Touch from 2012 that I use fairly often. I've received a bunch of gifts in eBook form over the years, and want to be able to read them on my computer and other devices. Calibre natively supports getting eBooks to and from devices such as mine[1], and there's a plugin out there (not too hard to find, but I won't name it here just in case) that automatically strips DRM from files during the import-to-library process. Of course, you can also just import files from your computer, and it will de-DRM those as well. Calibre also has a built-in content server[2] that's pretty configurable and allows you to share with friends; it essentially whips up a website that lets you both read eBooks in browser and download them in whatever formats you have.

You can also have it convert between most eBook formats and more[3]; you can be as granular as you want during the conversion process, or just use a default profile that comes with the software.

Of course, you can also edit any format of eBook that you've imported into your library[4]. I haven't personally tried that feature, but it looks like you'd be able to manage diagrams.

I realize that this is a fair amount of work to do on the consumer side to address the problems you've brought up, but as a multi-device reader (computers big and small, Kindle, phone), it does a great job without much hassle for me.

[0]https://calibre-ebook.com/ [1]https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#device-integration [2]https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html [3]https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#id6 [4]https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/edit.html

I don't know about anyone else but I always remove DRM from my eBooks, which is trivially easy and solves two of your problems.

Not sure if it's permitted to link to it here but it's pretty easy to find the tool that does this.

This is missing the point. Can I expect to always be able to remove DRM from any ebooks I might want to buy in the future, no matter what the platform vendor does? Obviously not - that's not a "trivially easy" operation in any real sense. "Just remove the DRM" is always a band-aid and a last-resort, not a real solution.

...and the other two problems are not solved by physical books either.

eBooks are great but will never entirely kill off books. Personally I find an ebook to be useless for anything that does not contain entirely text, pictures or diagrams are messed up or just hard to appreciate properly. An iPad/tablet is required for anything with images eg. Technical books or graphic novels (usually as PDF). But none of them will offer the feel of a book. My kids could easily have an ebook but I think the value in learning to love an actual book far outweighs any benefit an eresrer would give them.

If your kids are the right age, can you have them try reading this on their iPad?…

[1] https://bubblin.io/cover/stroke-of-genius-by-david-revoy

or…

[2] https://bubblin.io/cover/pride-and-prejudice-by-jane-austen

if slightly senior. I'm looking for some outside-in feedback, though kids in my neighborhood have so far liked the experience.

Most of the book sales mentioned in the article are for fiction books which don't have the issues you describe.

True, I have no reason to care about DRM for truly throwaway content that I'll never want to backup, format-shift or port across platforms-- like most fiction books. But the thing is... there's plenty of such content on the Web already, available at zero cost! It's exactly the sort of content that plenty of people will happily write for free, or perhaps in exchange for some crowd-funded support on Patreon.

A significant number of ebooks I buy for Kindle seem to be poor OCR jobs, lacking periods and other punctuation and even making incorrect letter substitutions when the font has ligatures. It does not make them unreadable, but makes the experience less enjoyable.

> you can't lend them, you can't switch platforms easily

I think you're referencing implementations by specific companies. None of these are problems if you possess a plain ebook file.

You can't write on them or annotate them with visible bookmarks.