Is it safe to assume that eBooks will eventually go through a similar lifecycle as mp3s? Where, at first, publishers force DRM on items sold, but eventually give in because of customer complaints and demands regarding stuff like what happened in this article?
Unfortunately, I think there are a number of differences that will make that harder with ebooks than regular books. Most significantly, people consume the media different. Excluding a few reference books and the Bible, I tend to read a book once and then I am done with it, and I think most people are like that. Even people who reread books only do it a few times with some spacing in between. With music, I keep adding to my collection, but I still have songs I found years ago in my MP3 player. I want to listen many times, so I have a big push to preserve every song for a long time and to be able to take them with me across multiple generations of devices. The push to have full control, while present, is much weaker for the average consumer.
Another lessor factor is that music was in an unprotected format (CDs) that could be easily made digital long before DRM existed for music. With books, the truly unprotected dead-tree form is difficult to digitize, so they have a different history in terms of consumer expectations.