[hombre_fatal]

What complicates this is that the negative issues with these systems are invisible to most people.

For example, the Kindle doesn't even expose its filesystem to the user. A power-user may use Calibre (separate software unaffiliated with Amazon) to extract an ebook from one Kindle in an effort to read it on their own Kindle. But upon opening the ebook, they will get a message "Sorry, this ebook is licensed to <friend's name>".

So there's really not going to be a big market for a DRM-less ereader/book store (Kobo, Kobo's store). My premise here being that DRM undermines ownership.

A similar issue exists for Steam vs gog.com. The latter gives you an executable you can copy onto a USB drive. While Steam won't even let you play a game if you haven't connected Steam to the internet in 30 days. The other day I couldn't even launch Steam because it knew there was an update but I had no internet, and it would not progress beyond the "updating..." launch modal. The average person doesn't run into these issues, else they would likely prefer gog.com where possible.

It's all a bit frustrating. There are almost zero market forces that reward the pro-consumer options, so there are no real drawbacks to being anti-consumer.