As the MSN Music shutdown (and others) demonstrated, quite possibly none at all. That's how DRM works.

There's no DRM media allowed in my house. I plan to live a lot longer than most companies' digital media divisions will!

Last week I finally broke down and bought a DRM book from B&N's website. It let me download an encrypted EPUB file, which I transferred to my Nook over USB. Without having to enable WiFi or register my Nook, I was able to open and read the EPUB just by entering my name and the credit card number used to purchase the book. (By the way, I only had to do this once.)

It still sucks because it's DRM, but I'm reasonably confident that with this setup, B&N can't remotely kill my books, and it should keep working even if B&N goes bust. You might want to consider it.

I mean, I'm not super-concerned with the prospect of wasting $15... it's the principle of the thing.

He'll get a new expiry date. Credit card companies don't issue you a new number unless they really have to (card was use fraudulently)

Instead they just issue you a new expiry and CVC - and often even update merchants who are charging you on a regular basis with the new info, or allow transactions to continue to go through even with expired date/cvc

Still a valid concern regarding the card # being replaced due to fraud. I keep an encrypted list of all my past CC #s for this very purpose: Far too many places use the CC# as a life-long immutable number (think SSN).

What I was wondering is if he had to re-validate at some point in the future, would the expired card trip him up or would his encrypted copy still work?

I'd guess it would still work if he is doing this all without a network connection. If that works though, I hope their using the credit card info as a hash instead of directly storing it in their encrypted files... because that would be scary.

Purchased a book by accident? Refund instantly or done within 5 minutes. Switching devices? No problemo, pages are synced up to the last page you read. Wiping your device? All your books are online and available for download.

This seems like a fringe case that I'm not too worried about. I have a full purchase history on Amazon.com and if anything fails, I am pretty sure their customer service wouldn't become huge pricks to me for no reason at all.

But I still have concerns about the DRM. Amazon seems extremely stable, but things in tech move fast. Even if Amazon survives, I may eventually want to move to a completely different reader from a company that doesn't exist now, and the DRM will make it hard to take my library with me.

I love the cloud drive player Amazon rolled out for MP3s, but I have it redundantly backed up on 2 harddrives. With the Kindle content I don't have that option.

Its not too difficult to imagine edge cases where communication between the person taking the phone call and the person able to resolve the situation breaks down; that can happen in any large company. But then getting things resolved also requires good faith on the part of the complainant; filing chargebacks against a reputable company within a month of the problem isn't the best indication of this.

I guess worrying about those edge cases just kind of comes naturally, perhaps a little too much personal experience with Murphy's Law?

Perhaps really my chief complaint boils down to the stereotypical issue with DRM: If I paid for a book, why do I need your permission to read it?

However, as a service provider, edge cases are what keep me up at night but are fantastic opportunities for providing even better service. I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't care, but I personally wouldn't care too much about an edge case as long as Amazon does that person good.

As for DRM: if it isn't invasive or affect my experience with the book (Kindle and Steam are good examples here.) then I am okay by it. If it is used in some weird way to censor things? That's uncool.

A kill switch is a capability one party has over another. Once in place, it can be used for any purpose.

The thing I hate most though is the whole Kindle experience. Buying e-books from Amazon is kind of scammy since there's no confirmation page when you buy books and there's no way to turn off one-click for kindle books. Also, I wasn't able to find where to refund the book at all when I clicked "buy" thinking that there would be a confirmation page.

Also, the syncing is kinda broken because if you click a link in the book and end up in the appendix, there's no easy way to reset the furthest page read. Finally, epub is such a "free-ing" format since I can purchase books from Google books as well. Sync is just a minor convenience since e-book sellers will usually let you re-download the book anyway if you've purchased it.

There's a link for "Made a mistake?" which I clicked once, thinking I would get a confirmation page as well, and the refund was instantaneous.

Not really. I have a Kindle 3, and have loads of non-DRM-ed, 3rd party books on it.

I've totally written off the Kindle because of similar 3rd party content issues - anyone have first hand experience with the Nook or Kobo when used with ePub (mainly) and PDF (rarely) files?

I have 173Mb of files purchased and downloaded separately and side-loaded from PragProg, Manning, O'Reilly and SitePoint. (And a few classics from Gutenburg.)

I have no idea if it works with DRM'd 3rd-party content, though.

The device doesn't require Calibre for side-loading either as you can just drag the epub to the mounted device. Loading and using your own fonts is also a nice feature.

As for PDFs, if they are smaller page sizes it's pretty good, but the zooming and panning functions are kind of a pain--mainly because of e-ink, but partially due to UI.

I've only had one issue with the Kobo Touch when I had to reload my books, as for some reason the database became corrupted.

I connected it the PC and and simply copied epub and pdf to it using calibre. It comes with 100 free books that you can erase, none of the memory is reserved (except for the OS)

ePub works perfectly.

pdf is a little limited in range of zoom, for technical books I convert to epub with calibre and download that.

The only downside of the Kobo - it takes a long time to boot up if it has fully shutdown. Then once it has started it takes a long time to open books.