http://gigaom.com/2011/12/02/how-publishers-gave-amazon-a-stick-to-beat-them-with/

GigaOm reporting: We’ve described a number of times at GigaOM how Amazon is disrupting the traditional book-publishing business, both by allowing authors to self-publish and do an end-run around the traditional industry, and by signing writers to its own imprint — as well as starting its own e-book lending library and other ventures. But as author Charles Stross argues in a recent blog post, the mainstream publishers are partly to blame for their own misfortune, since they themselves handed Amazon one of the weapons it is using to attack them and steal their market share: the use of digital-rights management or DRM locks on their books.
...
Amazon could be a far bigger threat than piracy
But Stross makes the point that piracy isn’t the only threat the mainstream publishers face as their industry gets disrupted, and it may not even be the primary threat. The most significant threat, he argues, is that Amazon is eating their lunch in a variety of ways, and it shows every sign of continuing to do so:

The corporate drive for DRM is motivated by the fear of ebook piracy. But aside from piracy, the biggest ebook-related threat to the Big Six is called Amazon.co [and] the Big Six’s pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder.

http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect/xd_proxy.php?version=3#cb=f154e8c58&origin=http://gigaom.com/f56722c3c&relation=parent.parent&transport=postmessage&type=resize&height=20&ackData[id]=1&width=90