I think this is a good thing! DRM will just accelerate the death of those corporations who want to enforce it upon their customers (the publishers in this case, except for some clever ones like O'Reilly). Apple doesn't really have a choice, don't blame them. In the end it comes down to the old argument: DRM does not annoy people who get the stuff illegally, it only annoys paying customers.
So the publishers turn away the only chance they actually have to make people pay for their stuff: make it better than the illegal stuff. Instead of doing that, they make their offer worse than the illegal copies. They artificially cripple it and make it less interoperable, less practical and in a lot of ways worse than an analog copy of the book: you can't donate it to a library for example!
So while people who legitimately bought your product can't even use it in a way they could use an analog book, people who pirate it are able to take advantage of all the possibilities of digitial products: they can lend it to their mom and brother at once! They can copy that dinner recipe and email it to those people who liked it. They can copy citations used for their homework! They can convert it to whatever format they like and use it on all their devices, without being limited to one company, even 10 years from today!
So instead of offering additional value, the publishers make exactly the same mistake with the transition to digitial that the music industry made 10 years ago and is still trying to recover from.
