So maybe you were lucky enough to get an e-reader for the holidays. In fact, maybe you’re reading this article on one right now! Maybe you’re cozying up to your fire and you’re considering what e-book you want to download to get through these dark winter days.

But you’re an Ars reader, and you actually know (and care!) what DRM stands for. After all, we’ve been covering digital rights management for years, ever since it was a contentious issue in the music industry. You may recall that Amazon itself led the charge against Cupertino, challenging iTunes with cheaper downloads and a lack of DRM. But Amazon's lead in the fight against music DRM was a business decision rather than an ideological stance. You may remember our story from late October 2012, detailing how to strip DRM off of Amazon Kindle purchases as a means of backing up your titles and preventing Amazon from deleting your entire library on a whim.

And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? Or put another way, why doesn’t Amazon care about eliminating DRM for books, when it did for music?

For many industry watchers, it comes down to the fact that generally speaking, most people own more individual pieces of music than they do individual books—the American digital music market is still much bigger than the digital book market.

From a cultural standpoint, people want to put music on more devices than they do e-books, and some will want to remix that music. Aside from zombie crossover fanfic, few outside the ivory tower are interested in remixing the written word.

“Most people don’t care about the ethics of DRM or about the finer points of copyright policy,” Aram Sinnreich, a Media Studies professor at Rutgers University, told Ars. “What people care about, is being able to do what they want with the stuff that they think they have.”

But as some smaller publishing houses begin to abandon DRM entirely and users get frustrated with the difficulties in lending e-books, some wonder if this culture may begin to change in 2013.

The "wrong end of the stick" ?

There are authors and anti-DRM advocates who for years have been preaching the gospel of digital liberation of e-books.

That includes Cory Doctorow, who succinctly noted in Publisher’s Weekly earlier this year: “People buy DRM e-books because they have no choice, or because they don’t care about it, or because they don’t know it’s there.”

Doctorow, a well-known science fiction author and the co-founder of Boing Boing, has practiced what he preaches for years. Not only are his books available DRM-free, but they’re also available to download for free.

When Ars asked Doctorow why he thought there wasn’t the same degree of outrage, he dismissed it.

“I think you've got the wrong end of the stick,” he e-mailed. “There is widespread, years-long approbation over e-book DRM.”

While that may be true for the Cory Doctorows of the world, that certainly isn’t true for big-time publishers, for mainstream readers, or for other e-book vendors that are on the scale of Amazon.

A rather cozy birdcage

Perhaps most importantly, Amazon has headed off DRM concerns by making a Kindle book reading application for pretty much every platform imaginable. That way, you can download a Kindle book and read it on your Android, your iPad, or whatever else just as easily as you would on a bona fide Kindle reader. (Amazon did not respond to Ars’ repeated requests for comment.)

“Kudos to Amazon for designing it in such a way that consumers would be comfortable,” Sinnreich quipped.

Whether the company has intended it or not, most consumers are blissfully unaware of the realities of DRM because any Kindle book can be read on just about every device. But in fact, it wasn't very long ago that Amazon was at the forefront of this battle against sharing restrictions when it came to music.

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement in 2007.

Likely due to pressure from consumers and from Amazon, one record label after another began to agree to drop DRM on iTunes. By early 2009, DRM was formally, finally, dead—with all the labels on board.

Vampire-themed Jane Austen books aside, who remixes books, anyway?

Part of the lack of outrage, experts say, can be explained simply by the smaller market.

According to the NPD Group, digital-music revenue in the United States, not including streaming services, amounted to $2.1 billion in 2011. By comparison, e-books spending is smaller, with research from the Association of American Publishers placing revenue at nearly $1 billion.

Part of the reason may be impulse purchasing—it’s a lot easier to spontaneously buy an MP3 at $0.99 rather than an e-book at $9.99! But that isn't the only explanation that's been offered. “Maybe it's the low status of books in general,” Alissa Quart, the editor-at-large at The Atavist, “Book buyers don't get to get as outraged as music fans.”

Similarly, we’re all more likely to want to re-listen to older songs multiple times—and consequently, put them on multiple devices—than books, which tend to get read once and kept on a bookshelf (digital or analog.)

“You tend to re-visit old music more than old books,” said Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Some of that is the maturity of the ecosystem.”

Another possible explanation over the lack of outrage is that within music, not only is the market larger, but there’s more of a tradition of turning the original work (a song) into a derivative work, like a remix.

“When iTunes was introduced no one was thinking: ‘When I buy this, can I cut it up into ringtones?’” Higgins added. “They weren't thinking, ‘Can I set this to a rhythm game and play fake guitar to this?’ Because people love music, there's avenues for that remix. With books, especially with e-books, books as codecs aren't a very remixable form. People don't really know to do anything with them except start at the beginning and read to the end.”

He added that it may take awhile before authors and other developers come up with new applications that can take advantage of an open, DRM-less e-book.

“For example, a music player that matches sentiment through textual analysis—that would be possible with a [public domain e-book], but not be possible with a Kindle book,” Higgins said.

Quart, who is also author of the forthcoming book, The Republic of Outsiders, agreed, saying that even the biggest literary fans generally don’t do much besides read or perhaps quote other works that they like.

“There's not really a culture of remix amongst book readers,” she said. “There's a literary culture of appropriation and interesting fair use but I don't think a lot of readers have that relationship to it.”

Looking to the Cloud

However, one element of books versus music that experts say may even drive a cultural change in the publishing industry is the idea of borrowing books.

One of the major elements that drove the death of DRM was the ability to put music tracks in any format, in any device. Similarly, some speculate that it will take more time for enough e-book owners who want to share their favorite reads and be frustrated at that experience.

Currently, Amazon only allows lending of e-books of certain titles, and that can only be done once. The Barnes & Noble Nook has a similar lending policy—iBooks is even worse, as it doesn't have a lending feature to speak of.

"That's a farce—that's not what borrowing a book is," Higgins noted.

But borrowing may become a moot point if e-books start to be re-imaged as a service, rather than a product. If the music industry is any indication, then perhaps the publishing industry will start moving towards all-you-can-eat, cloud-based services. Few services like that, on a massive scale, exist here in the US.

However, a young Madrid-based startup may represent the future. 24Symbols is trying to become the Spotify of e-books.

"I want to watch a movie? Why download it when I can just go to a place like Hulu or Netflix and see it streamed?" Justo Hidalgo, co-founder of 24symbols, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle last year. "So we believe that's something that's starting to happen in the book industry. I mean, we know that because many people read on-screen and many people read without needing to own the content that they have, so that's what we call like the change, or the shift from the book as a product to book as a service.”