I mean... not wrong. But useful? Does this happen with any technology? Is it being blocked by practices from Amazon? Still feels like a non-sequitur.

DVDs could be purchased and played on any player. Most of the non-Amazon ebook world uses Adobe DRM.

As someone that was into DVDs from other regions, this comment is laughably wrong.

Edit: Heck, just playing movies on my computer DVD drives was less than straight forward. For the longest time you basically had to feel like a hacker to get it working on a linux machine.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the current situation with ebooks. You could go into an electronics retailer and choose one of a dozen DVD players then drive across town to video store and buy or rent any DVD and the chances that the two things would work together was very high.

No real disagreement from me, on that general point. Things were certainly more convenient in some older formats.

I'm not clear on the relevance to this particular story. For one, ebook practices are literally not part of this case. For two, the assertion in this branch is that that exists at the demands of publishers.