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DRM Lawsuit Filed By Independent Bookstores Against Amazon, "Big Six" Publishers
concealment writes "Three independent bookstores are taking Amazon and the so-called Big Six publishers (Random House, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) to court in an attempt to level the playing field for book retailers. If successful, the lawsuit could completely change how ebooks are sold. The class-action complaint, filed in New York on Feb 15., claims that by entering into confidential agreements with the Big Six publishers, who control approximately 60 percent of print book revenue in the U.S., Amazon has created a monopoly in the marketplace that is designed to control prices and destroy independent booksellers."
Nothing stops a user from buying a DRM free ebook and using it on their reader.
As long as someone is selling that book in DRM-free format, that is. I'm going through this issue now with the publisher of three magazines I read on a regular basis, one of which I've been a print subscriber for thirty years or more. The only DRM-free (and multi-format, to boot) vendor (Fictionwise) stopped selling. Every other source has DRM (or the equivalent, being tied to a proprietary reader program).
I complained loudly to the publisher and got ignored at first, and then I was told that this issue was being examined and they wanted to move away from the retailers they were using. The confusing part was that she said that "we won't do that DRM again". I don't know if she meant "we will be DRM-free when we arrange future retailers", or if she was referring to the DRM-free versions they used to provide to Fictionwise not happening again.
Either way, Calibre and epub is your friend, except when the publishers start mangling the formats so you get black and white cover images and say essentially "read these articles in this order".