How We Got Into this E-Book Mess

Over the years I've written now and then about the e-book wars that most recently saw Apple trying to paint Amazon as the bully in defending its own actions against charges of price-fixing collusion. Over at Boingboing, Cory highlights a new (DRM-free) e-book The Battle of $9.99 about how the whole mess got started. The short form seems to be that publishers were too focused on the Google Books fight and didn't stop to consider carefully what would happen if Kindle really became successful. Oh, and because DRM.