Hi. I'm a roleplayer.

The roleplaying market is peanuts compared to the general publishing market, but it has a devoted fanbase that continuously consumes its books. Watching their relationship to e-books, and mine, has been interesting.

The first primary objection was the FLGS idea, the "Friendly local (book) store." You had a place with nice people who could tell you what was up, and a nice location to hang out. I don't know how well this translates to the general market, but it was likely the biggest obstacle to e-books: You were supposed to support the local brick-n-mortar, not Amazon, and certainly not e-books.

But brick-n-mortar has been dying, and there's nothing the RPG industry can do about it. Amazon and e-books are just plain cheaper and, more importantly, allow you to hold onto old editions without taking up valuable shelf-space (the information storage capacity of a bookshelf is nothing compared to a server harddrive). Plus it gives "small publishers" a voice. There's a huge flourishing of independent writers right now, thanks to pdf files.

We use to have heavy DRM, for exactly the reasons you state above: Publishers were leery of theft. But DRM only stopped consumers from buying them, not thieves. Now they just watermark the book with your name, so if you turn around and put it on a P2P network, it's easy to track who started it (and yes, you can get rid of those. You can get rid of DRMs too)

Finally, portability is one of the big reasons I've switched to e-books. Having a hardcover in my hands is nice, but I've begun running games for people across the Atlantic, and it's much easier to send my friend a digital copy to put on her laptop and show people than it is to try to mail (or order) a hard copy.

A digital book + laptop means you can carry your entire library with you which, for a gamer with a substantial library, can be a big advantage.

Publishers may have thought that publishing a digital book is doing half the work of the pirates.

That's just silly. As you noted a pirate can take a picture, but the fargin' text is bounced all over the publishing house as 1s and 0s, the author sends it via email, the publisher transmits it to the printer ...

Several weak links in the chain - it only takes one disgruntled employee with a modest amount of tech savvy. Or if you're really dedicated a pirate with a sniffer. It's a safe bet that they don't encrypt the traffic at all.

Bdunbar:

the fargin' text is bounced all over the publishing house as 1s and 0s, the author sends it via email, the publisher transmits it to the printer ...

Yeah, but they guarded this book like a state secret. There probably wasn't much bouncing around going on with this book.

Notice that the pirate in this particular case didn't release a text file. That would have been easy to do with a scanner and OCR. It was more important to him that he show that it was really the Potter book.