Late in the first decade of the 21st century, solid opposition to DRM in music made the publishers back down. The arguments were that Digital Rights Management is ineffective against determined crackers, diminishes the value of purchases, and punishes the honest. However, readers have largely caved in to DRM in ebooks, even though the arguments are equally valid there, as confirmed by experience. Some publishers don’t use DRM, and some authors don’t let their publishers use it, but a large proportion of e-books are restricted by encryption. I can’t find any figures on the proportion of sales, but DRM is the default with many major distributors, such as Amazon, and many readers just don’t seem to care.
People are beginning to notice, though, that they don’t own a book under DRM; they only license it as long as the vendor supports it. The Sony Reader is dead. Barnes and Noble’s Nook is dying by slow stages. Many smaller publishers are issuing their books DRM-free; it’s mostly the biggest publishers that restrict access. My own e-books, Files that Last and Tomorrow’s Songs Today, are unencumbered by DRM.
Removing DRM isn’t hard. You can find lots of pages with information on how to do it. I don’t know which ones work safely, since I don’t buy ebooks with DRM in the first place.
If Simon and Schuster had its way, it could sue me for huge amounts of money for posting that link, but a federal judge ruled against it. So I’m legal in providing you that link. I hope.
I also hope that eventually the big publishers will figure out that they’re only hurting their readers and losing business by restricting users’ ability to save and convert the books they download.
I’ve received an email reply from Becky McGuiness at Open Preservation Foundation to my query about JHOVE’s status. She says that VeraPDF has been taking all the development resources, as I suspected, but that work on JHOVE (in particular, fixing the expired installer) will resume soon. 
iTunes is horrible and keeps getting worse. The current version has come down with dyslexia; it can’t even play my files in order. On top of that, it supports a poor range of file formats, knowing nothing about popular open formats like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. QuickTime Player has a saner user interface but the same format limitations. If you want to play music in those formats, you need to look for other software. I’ve just grabbed 
In December, JHOVE 12.0 was very close to a release. Since then, 
Why exactly is MP3 still popular? It’s not as efficient as more recent compression methods, and it’s encumbered by patents. People keep using what’s familiar. In a few years, it may become patent-free.
If anything causes more controversy than DRM (digital rights management), it’s joining DRM with an open standard. The World Wide Web Consortium’s 
Mad File Format Science 
Data storage meets biotech
With Microsoft’s entry into the field, the use of DNA for data storage is an increasingly serious area of research. DNA is effectively a base-4 data medium, it’s extremely compact, and it contains its own copying mechanism.
Don’t expect a disk drive in a molecule. DNA isn’t a random-access medium. Rather, it would be used to archive a huge amount of information and later read it back in bulk. A wild idea would be to store information in a human ovum so it would be passed through generations, making it literal ancestral memory. Now there’s real Mad File Format Science for you!
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