I get why the original mistakes were made, but to this day, they generally keep making the same mistakes. Amazon is by far the largest ebook player and DRM is one way they maintain that control.
Real books are great but I have no space to put them and I’d rather not lug them around when I travel. So I purchase ebooks and either remove the DRM or just pirate a version to archive.
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And they will be like “great, how do we get rid of these?”
My family has this issue with books - through generations we’ve collected a bunch, and as people move or die it’s always an additional chore to figure out what to do with the books. Most of my grandparents’ books for example are practically worthless: most of them are from specific fields/topics but are mostly outdated and no library or used bookstore would take them in. We tried selling them online, no catch. There’s way too many of them to sit down and go through them. So at this point they’re sitting there quietly rotting away, until someone finally takes a deep breath and throws them out.
Same with my parents’ books. They used to have quite a lot, but when they separated and moved into smaller places there wasn’t enough space for the books. No-one having the heart to throw them out, nor the time to go through them and try to find a new home for them, the books are now sitting in a storage, again, quietly rotting away until mom or my (former) stepfather takes a deep breath and just throws them out.
Me, I used to have a whole lot of books until I moved and… well, see above. In my current apartment I have only about two shelf-racks’ worth of books that I’m slowly trying to find in electronic version so I can get rid of the physical copies.
Edit: I think I should add that the overwhelming majority of these books are not in English but in Hungarian, which severely limits the opportunities to resell/donate/etc. them, what with it being a fairly small country. And it’s quite surprising how libraries just don’t want donations nowadays - a few years ago I tried to donate a whole set of classical literature and every single library I tried said “nope, we’re not interested”. I tried charities, but no, they weren’t interested either. (I guess I could have gone on to find a school or something that would take them in, but there’s only 24 hours in a day.)
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that isn’t really much of an issue in my family. my parents and my sibling and i have all passed down a love of reading and an appreciation of books. my house, though quite small, has a room devoted to books with 6 bookshelves along the walls. my mother’s house has twice as much book space as i do built into the walls of the house when it was built. my sister’s house was similarly fixed with built-in bookshelves. my personal library has things from rarities to personal favorites to technical, scientific, and mathematical resources, to fluff. sometimes i use garage sales to downsize the fluff category so as to make room for new ones but no one in my family is going to look at any of our collections and say
in any kind of general and comprehensive sense. it’s going to be more likely they will fight over who gets what.
That’s what my great-grandparents and my grandparents thought as well. But one man’s treasure is another man’s trash, especially when the “treasure” is a Hungarian translation of some Soviet scientist’s work on a long-outdated and forgotten scientific theory, or collections of classical composers’ biographies written with a Marxist-Leninist bent. 
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I’ve sometimes seen micro-libraries like this (often in parks):
Also, I’ve seen a little “take a book or leave one” rack at my local commuter train station.
Ouch. That does kind of limit your market.
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Internally, at least in the engineering department, Amazon doesn’t care about DRM one way or the other. The distribution system is what locks customers in. They’ve long know that the format used for a majority of kindle context is trivial to crack. Fixing that has not been a priority for them.
It’s a bit like the HDMI/HDCP situation, the HDCP1.2 encryption is trivial to unlock, and hardware vendors selling HDMI gear don’t care about the DRM. The industry keeps building it because they always have built it that way and it’s built into the spec. The content industry feels that weak DRM is enough of a hurdle to keep the average joe from pirating.
The latest version of Amazon’s DRM (KF8) is definitely not trivial to crack. The most common attack is to pretend you have an old Kindle that doesn’t support the newer typography stuff to trick Amazon into sending you the file wrapped in the previous DRM. You will be able to see the text, but you lose some of the formatting and layout improvements.
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I don’t buy very many movies. When I do, I get them on disc with the digital copy. So at least I will have the physical copy if the servers ever do go up.
Libraries don’t want their collections determined by the agendas or vagaries of donations, so all the libraries that accept donations in my area sell those books either in the library, an associated cafe or at annual book sales to raise cash. Curation is a major part of what libraries do. Entering a book into the library’s collection costs materials and staff time, which they just don’t have extra of and need to use it for books they have decided on and sourced themselves.
However, as has been pointed out, there are many “Little Libraries” now where you can leave and/or take books. I think this is because we have nostalgia for books, but they are, unfortunately, sufficiently worthless that we can now leave books in the open without much worry that the little libraries will be raided and the books sold to used bookstores.
(Well, it does happen to a degree, when I used to be a buyer for a used book store there were people who would regularly come in and try to sell boxes of low value books in not great condition, books that appeared to have been swiped from book sharing collections. We did not buy those books for multiple reasons.)
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i’d take a couple from each category listed for my collection. i already have a few non-english books and those sound fun.
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