I think Amazon has mostly learned the mistakes of the record labels made. They realize if they go hog-wild on the DRM that the public are just going to go the torrents.
The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits).
In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.
The textbook renting service Kindle introduced last month depends quite heavily on DRM.
I verified recently that I can "rent" a book for, say, 30% of its "buy" price, remove the DRM, and be left with a DRM-free book (not limited to a month rental).
It's padlock DRM, cheap, easy and keeps out the vast majority of casual piraters by being more of a hassle than just paying the usual $10. Biggest bang for the buck. People who are really cheap or poor would just go to the library and get it for free in some form or torrent it anyway and you wont get any money from those people.
Agreed, put your resources toward a much better user experience as opposed to preventing people from accessing your content.
DRM is something you have to constantly bandaid as people break it, and it's always broken quicker than you can push out fixes for the most part, so it's just futile.
The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits).
In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.