I recently browsed the Barnes & Noble Web site looking for an electronic book to read. Sure, I had two e-book readers crammed with free content, but now I wanted something more recent, such as Stephen Ambrose's new book "The Wild Blue," the story of the B-24 bomber campaigns against the Nazis. Or how about David McCullough's life of John Adams? Credit card at the ready, I prepared to buy online.

Guess what I found? A wide variety of e-books are available, but in such a profusion of formats that even industry watchers like myself can get confused. Barnes & Noble lets me download e-books in any of three formats: for Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat or the Gemstar e-book. I own devices that will read Reader and Gemstar books. Unfortunately, Acrobat is thus far available only for reading on the PC itself, not on a separate device.

Some books are available in only one of these formats. That means, though I can read "The Wild Blue" on a PC screen in Adobe Acrobat format, I can't read it on a Pocket PC. I can't, in other words, view a book I have bought on the device of my choice. Among other Ambrose titles, "The Victors" is available in Gemstar format, and "Nothing Like It in the World" comes only in a Microsoft Reader edition.

It gets worse. The differing e-book reader programs use different techniques to protect copyright. So-called Digital Rights Management software is available from companies such as Microsoft itself, or Adobe, or through third parties such as Content Guard. Such software means that I can't make copies of my e-books, either, and I certainly can't loan one to a friend. Microsoft Reader, for example, lets me read the same e-book on up to two devices (i.e., two Reader-compatible devices), but no more than this.

I got more than a little frustrated. So I tried Peanut Press. The company offers a wide range of content for its own software reader, called PalmReader. The latter works on Palm PDAs, of course, but also on Pocket PC machines.

PalmReader, which uses Microsoft's ClearType technology (as does Microsoft Reader) is first-rate; the text is crisp enough on the screen for me to read without eyestrain. I found numerous books that interested me at its site (http://www.peanutpress.com) In particular, I discovered several magazines that I normally read in paper form, and lo and behold, Peanut Press had McCullough's "John Adams."

But I soon discovered that I couldn't copy and paste from the text to make my annotations. Normally, I like to snip quotes out of the book in question and make comments on them. PalmReader doesn't let me do this. Peanut Press tells me that future versions will include copy functions, but they will be limited as part of whatever digital rights management system is being used by the original publisher.

You can see where I'm going. Electronic books are no threat to printed volumes while they impose such counter-intuitive restrictions on readers. Which is why the case of Dmitry Sklyarov is drawing so much notice from those interested in electronic text. Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who figured out how to crack the encryption that Adobe uses in its e-books. He was arrested after describing the technology to a conference of hackers in Las Vegas.

The grounds for Sklyarov's arrest come from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed in 1998 with a prohibition against circumventing copyright-protection technologies like those used in commercial e-books. The prohibition stands even if the work is done as research. Sklyarov could face 25 years in prison if convicted; his employer, a Moscow-based company called ElcomSoft, has also been indicted on the same five counts.

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