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kilobug comments on Knowledge is Worth Paying For - Less Wrong
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I agree with most of your estimates. The only one with which I disagree is the 2, I would put it near the level of the 1, maybe at 90%, but doesn't matter much. You're reasoning on 5 years, which is a relatively short time frame, but that's not the main problem either.
There are two problems which are not really accounted in your estimates, IMHO :
Black Swans : the probability is very low, but we can't rule out some catastrophic outcome, like fanatics (from Tea Party or whatever) seizing power and wanting to ban evolution-related books. The odds are very low, but who would have predicted Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler or the Rwanda genocide ? I just don't want anyone to hold the power to massively terminate copies of books easily, even if I'm pretty sure they won't use that power. Because I'm just "pretty sure" of it. So I want to steer the future in a direction in which they just can't hold the power. A dystopia like The Right to Read is not impossible either. And yes I know about the fallacy of using fictional evidence, but let me use it as a lossy compression to convey a concept in a few words.
The actual consequences of DRM, even without any intent to abuse from them : you can't (easily) lend or give the ebooks for example. And what about the future ? When your Kindle dies in 10 years, what's the chance that you can't transfer the ebooks on the new device you bought ? Those problems are real and serious too.
Personally, I tend to agree with Vornaskotti on this:
There's a difference, though. The space an ebook occupies is far cheaper than the space a physical book occupies. I can see selling or giving physical books to reclaim their space, but, so long as you have any index whatsoever, getting rid of ebooks seems silly.
The quote didn't say anything about getting rid of ebooks? (It only said that if those ebooks happened to get lost, it wouldn't really matter.)
The main reason I didn't put the predictions more than five years is because the ebook technology is changing very rapidly so I don't feel comfortable making any predictions that far in the future. It also isn't that relevant to the discussion in question since it isn't that incredibly likely that one will have the same ebook reader now as one has in five years.
Regarding 1- right, most of the probability goes into extreme unanticipated events, although to be blunt, it seems like your politics are showing a bit in a mindkilling fashion. To only briefly touch on the mindkilling issues- the Tea Partiers have shown little interest in censorship or the like. Moreover, in the cases of both Stalin and Hitler, the censorship wasn't at all a gradual thing. If one does have advanced warning about any censorship regime the e-readers have a really simple solution- turn off the external connection and don't let any of their servers talk to it.
2 falls under what I discussed earlier in terms of borrowing and related issues. Those are all issues I agree are much more serious. There's no question that ereaders do raise serious problems. I just don't think that removal of material is one that is a high concern.