If there's no control, you will have some unpaid for copies floating about,
that's obvious. but, in general, most people will pay a fair price for most things, just not a rip off price. Some people will go to a lot of trouble to make illegal copies of anything, but that happens with or without DRM. To me, there are two issues in regards to e-books and only one is about DRM.
I have no DRM on the electronic format books I sell as I allow the readers to have it able to be read on any device they have that can read the code, but I only use code that doesn't require a special device or may become obsolete within a few years. Thus my stories are available as html, .odt, or .pdf by me. One publisher has an arrangement for some via Amazon that I didn't know about until this month.
I've seen many complaints about DRM stopping people from reading stories because it's only available on one device, and then the Amazon case of 'steal the story back' adds to the problem, as does the issue of obsolete systems like the MS .lit files that few can use now.
I'd rather lose a few sales and have happy customers, than lose customers by draconian measures they don't like. You'd be surprised how many people refuse to buy those proprietary book formats. Anyway, a single sale lost is not huge money, and it's not like people are going to make millions of pirate copies to spread around the world.
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O have another issue with the proprietary e-book formats due to them not allowing for the e-book to look as clean and nice as the pdf or printed copy due to format deficiencies in the proprietary e-book formats.
