Get your hands off my books, you damn dirty DRM

While waiting in my dentist's office this morning I started reading BusinessWeek and came across a story about Sony's new ebook reader. The hardware sounds nice, but there is no way copy-protected ebooks are going to succeed. As I keep telling my kids when it comes to music, if there is DRM you are renting not buying. A day will surely come when you switch hardware or the company switches DRM schemes and your music will go away. Personally, I don't care that much about music, but when DRM is applied to books I get a little crazy. For book buyers owning the book is at least as important as reading it. I'm not even going to talk about the way books smell or the way they feel in your hands. I accept that digital books may replace physical ones, but interfering with my ability to own a book, and even pass it on to my kids or future grandkids is not something I will tolerate. When people predicted the effects of computer technology on society 20 years ago, nobody imagined that software licenses would eventually spread to books and music. I'll predict now that ebooks will never become popular while DRM is in place.