For better or worse, the books you buy for your Kindle via Amazon exist only in places that receive Amazon’s express consent. They utilize digital rights management (DRM) technology to make sure that your Kindle books stay on your Kindle, or at least in the Kindle App on your iPhone or Blackberry. Sites like Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, by contrast, offer a plethora of public domain titles that be transmitted from place to place without concern for brand name or publishing rights.

The benefits of the former are plainly obvious from the publisher’s perspective, but as a consumer, it’s a little disconcerting knowing that the books you spent hundreds of dollars on for your Kindle remain in Amazon’s little gated community. What if a non-Amazon e-Reader is the most attractive product on the market when your Kindle eventually bites the dust? You really don’t have any choice except to stay with the brand you’ve chosen.

Or that’s the status quo, anyway. A recent report by the BBC indicates that an Israeli hacker by the name of Labba cracked Amazon’s DRM, allowing users to make PDF versions of all the proprietary AZW files on their Kindles. Subsequent reports seem to indicate that Amazon has already patched out this capability, but the speed of the automatic firmware upgrades is unknown.

This isn’t the first time that an extremely popular DRM file format has been hacked. Anti-copyright measures in DVDs have been circumvented for years, and it was just four years ago that Apple’s proprietary iTunes file format was hacked as well. It’s a classic back and forth battle between big companies and hackers, and it always seems like, given enough time, the hackers prevail.

Demographically, Kindle owners trend towards the northern side of middle age, so it’s probably too much to expect that people are going to be going out there in droves to download an experimental beta of a program to crack the DRM on the latest Robin Cook novel. As the market for the Kindle becomes more mainstream, however, piracy could start to become more of a factor.

I think this just underscores the notion that Amazon’s quest to keep the DRM in place is ultimately a doomed one. Barnes & Noble’s promising, if flawed, lending system is just one baby step in the right direction. It’s really just a matter of time before one of the major e-Reader makers opts to lighten the DRM restrictions to gain a competitive advantage.

The sanest solution to me is to adopt the EPUB standard. It allows publishers to maintain DRM control of their content, while also allowing for portability between devices. The Kindle doesn’t support EPUB at the moment, but the Sony Reader and the Nook do. Unfortunately, Amazon is unlikely to agree to such a standard unless they feel their position is being threatened, which given the holiday they’re having, won’t be any time soon.

So for the time being, we’ll continue to plug along in our little DRM-restricted community while hackers jostle about outside, smashing holes in the fence.