That's already happened - the Adobe DRM "standard", and readers like the Kobo. It's going nowhere, because the selection of ebooks is much smaller than Amazon's, so few people want to buy one of their readers, and you can't read those ebooks on the kindle, so no-one buys the books either.
If they sold DRM-free ebooks then there might be a chance for other ebook stores to get established selling to kindle owners (though given how well integrated the kindle and its store are, I'm not sure), and then amazon might be forced to sell DRM-free ebooks too and at that point the market in readers could open up, and it'd be music all over again (where iTunes is still the 800lb gorilla, but no longer in a monopoly position). You'd think book publishers would learn from history...
I'll be glad if the publishing industry chooses DRM-free as their standard. But that's unlikely. And if the standard will be pushed by the editors - or if they adopt Adobe's one - I guess there will be a lot of content...
