Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here.
blog.louisgray.com
blog.louisgray.com
In a world where you not only need serials and registration to play multi-player games, but many single player games, it's becoming difficult to even argue against digital download game services, like Steam (on which I currently have 400+ games). Hell, you don't even have to concern yourself with shelf space, theft, loss, or damage anymore.
The problem is that you also have to accept several negatives. Like DRM or the inability to resell a purchased book, album, movie, or game.
The problem is that you have to make several leaps of faith, too. Faith that the source of your content will still be around for the length of time that you'd own the physical version (several generations, in the case of books). Faith that their DRM won't bite you in the ass. Faith that something won't happen to your account which restricts your access to your content and that if it does, their customer services is accessible and responsive. Faith that they won't suddenly yank content you've already paid. Faith that they won't do any dirty aggregation or data mining as you use content that you own.
I'm all for digital, but I think we need some serious commitment from publishers and distributors and content warehouses before we continue making huge investments into what is essentially a collection of content licenses. An industry-enforced sort of "bill of digital content consumer rights" wouldn't be unreasonable.
This seems a lot of work in a world where most content, and most popular content, is disposable by design.
The books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to...I really can't think of how any of it could be described as "disposable by design".
I read a book written in 1966 the other day. That's young by the standards of literature, and yet it's older than I am.
Netflix's entire business model is built on movies not having an expiration date.
And to call music "disposable" is a statement that I don't even know how to respond to.
You do have a point, the book I'm reading right now is a hardback that was published and printed in 1958, but it has suffered some deterioration. The paper in quite a few paperbacks I bought in the '80s are in worse shape.
But then there's projects like Google Books to capture such artifacts ... if they can only negotiate the lawyer gauntlet.
There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)
It is surely indisputable that much popular music is produced with short-term profit rather than musical excellence in mind.
That, I suggest, is disposable music. Is Britney Spears music getting a bit old? Don't worry, there'll be new mindless, trivial drivel here in a short while.
I may be understanding your point, and if so I apologize, but I think the "format rot" argument is a red herring. Yes, formats come and go. But as long as there's a sizable catalog of content in a given format, it's going to be readable. We can still read WAV files, RTF files and AVI files from decades ago. In fact, most computers can read these formats without even downloading any special tools.
It's true that reading your VisiCalc spreadsheets off of an old tape backup is going to be a pain in the ass. But that was the freaking dawn of digital storage. Imagining that there is going to be the same upheaval in storage in the next 100 years as there was in the last 200 years is absurd. Things are stabilizing. Media are being abstracted away. Powerful catalogs of codecs and transcoders are being packaged up into easy-to-integrate services.
I think there's a reasonable chance that YouTube videos will be viewable on all computing devices for the rest of time without us having to do any transcoding. Maybe Google will migrate to new formats like they're doing with WebM. Maybe Google will eventually sell YouTube off as a historical relic. Maybe they'll even shut it down and someone will suck out all the public video and store it somewhere else like they did with GeoCities.
But acting like YouTube is the same as some tape backup, or an LP... it's just not. The technology is at a very different stage in it's life cycle.
Nonetheless, your argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is essentially that The Internet will automagically preserve all content, the way to decode it and reproduce it in the way it was originally intended to be consumed - forever.
The implication in my post was that the internet won't last forever, that civilizations come and go, and maybe with the end of our civilization the internet will be lost, and with it the key to decoding all this information. I understand that the devices themselves will or already have the capability to preserve the data forever (for all practical purposes), but this is akin to being on a deserted island and saying you have 8 million songs on your iPod, but no earphones to play them with. On top of that, imagine that you go through all the trouble of figuring out how to make earphones from raw materials you find on this island, figuring out how the plug is supposed to work, how to charge the battery - only to find out that the songs are all crap.
I actually think the internet is a kind of permaculture. It's like a new kingdom. We have animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the bacteria, fungi, etc, and now the bit kingdom. And it's as robust as the other kingdoms.
I doubt you could come up with any kind of vaguely plausible scenario where the internet disappeared completely.
Books decay. Digital files get corrupted. Companies rise and fall. I know I'll end up buying things more than once, just like I did with my Depeche Mode collection - at least three times.
When you are changing the physical media, it's a little more understandable (even though you're still really just giving me a license to the content on it and nothing else). When it's already in digital format, it's no longer acceptable to play that sucker's game, as far as I'm concerned.
If you have a hard drive full of images and it fails, it's all gone (better have a backup!), but if you have a box full of photos and your house floods, some of them may still be around.
Analog fades, digital dies, unless it's constantly resuscitated. When you think about it how many times have you found an old photo that you probably wouldn't have kept if you had the choice? Or some old photos or music at your grandparent's house.
What are my grand kids going to find at my house?
With a book or a photo, the storage of information, and it's mechanism for display are one and the same. With all digitally encoded media, one must have the appropriate decoder.
If I keep a journal on wordpress.com, it can't be left to grow old and musty, with no effort. It decays absolutely the instant it is not being maintained, where as if I keep a journal on a notepad, it can take up a tiny amount of physical space in the real world, and lie somewhere unmaintained for centuries without decaying to the point of unusability.
As the speed of information creation and transfer has increased, so too has the longevity of that information decreased. From stone tablets, to papyrus, to SMS messages stored on an SD card - the volume of the world's information is now increasing at an astounding rate but would archaeologists be able to discover it thousands of years from now?
A few years ago a similar statement could have been made about Myspace or friendster a few years before that. Would you be willing to make such a statement about either company today?
Would you have been willing to make such a statement about geocities 5 years ago?
Mostly, I think Facebook has achieved the status of a utility. It is entrenched, with a solid business model. It's drastically different than Myspace and Friendster in that way. They were just fads.
Also, GeoCities was at least partially saved. As we develop more computing infrastructure of all kinds, that kind of thing becomes more an more likely.
I'm picky about my music, so I don't buy new CDs that often, but when I do, it's usually for an artist I really like. When I have the opportunity, it's at a show for that artist, which hopefully means that they're getting a larger chunk of that $15 than it would if I buy it elsewhere.
Music and books are, of the media you listed, the ones where you could conceivably have a dinner party with all of the creative folks involved.
Even for reference materials, ebooks still seem like the bastard child of a reference textbook and a proper hyperlinked manual.
For novels the difference (for me at least) is that the Kindle makes it easier to focus on actually reading.
I was surprised by this but turning a page is a small nudge of the thumb and your focus remains on the text, the device is light enough that holding it in the same position for an extended period or getting comfortable in bed or in a chair is far easier than for a book (even a paperback - and the difference between the Kindle and a hardback or trade paperback isn't even funny). Small barriers that you weren't even really aware of that are either taken away or noticeably reduced.
Of course there's all the additional stuff - buying books instantly nearly anywhere, carrying a whole library in your pocket and so on - but they turn out to be bells and whistles. The real difference is that it's just a better device for consuming text.
For reference books (at least large ones) the Kindle isn't there yet (layout, searching, colour and a few other key things) but without having hands on experience I can see the iPad could well remove most of those issues at which point searching and electronic notes, combined with reduced bulk (the iPad is heavy but not next to a 500 page programming book) likely give it an edge over paper.
Then again, I don't know how to write a love note on the front page of ebooks I'm giving as gift, and they are still not bathtub-compliant :)
I also find navigating a book-length document on a laptop or something quite tedious. When I'm reading a complex book (where I often want to refer to the index, endnotes, or photographs) I will often have several fingers folded in at the relevant pages and can jump around quite quickly.
Introducing a playback device (such as going from book -> Kindle + ebook) is quite different, I think.
Also, there's definitely something to be said not only for carrying your book around on a light device, but carrying up to thousands of them around on a single light device. (Though, on the other hand, how often are you going to need to go back and read most of your non-reference books after you've finished them?).
As a book nerd, you often relate to books in response to certain situations. Instead of summarizing, we can now quickly access the eloquent prose of a gifted author that had time to express herself :)
I think eBooks are fine for "on-the-go," but hard copies certainly have a place on my bookshelf. In time, hard copies will become a niche product, one you use while sitting in your easy chair on a cold winter night. Everyone thought the radio will die with the advent of TV, but it just found a niche (nobody listens to the radio in their house, but they do in their car).
As a side note, the OP said that he prefers reference books as hard copy books. When I think of reference books though, I think searchable content, which means I want my references to be in eBook format.
Paper books still have some interface advantages over ebooks (as several people have described in this thread) but they'll go away as people build proper, well designed ebook readers.
When that happens, all books will have going for them is nostalgia and a pleasant physical experience that can't be replicated digitally. I think a much more apt comparison is records, which don't provide a fundamentally different sonic experience, but do have nostalgia and physicality.
So I think a handful of book lovers will still have collections, and visit the bookstore down the street, but like record players, and unlike radios, I think the vast majority of the population won't have any.
Definitly. There's something exhilerating about bringing all your books with you.
There are practical advantages aswell. I'm going on a 3 week holiday to australia soon. Previously I'd have to deciede what books I want to bring with me (since I couldn't take them all). Now I don't have to think about it. I just take my kindle and I know I have all my books.
It doesn't really have to OCR, but should allow for tagging and searching.
I would really like to get rid of my stacks of old (administrative) paper, and the ones that I still receive through snailmail.
DVDs/CDs/books don't bother me as much, as they look nice, but those binders with crappy old paper I can't wait to throw it out.
On the other hand, as it is a cloud service, you have to trust them to keep the data. Do they make it possible to access/backup your documents through some API?
Hm I guess in that case I could simply use Google documents as well. Seems that it even (experimentally) supports OCR: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...
I still cannot fathom owning one.
Digital media has a lot of social issues to work out. A book doesn't come with a TOS or EULA. The media the story comes on doesn't require a special licensed reader from the book store. It doesn't come crippled with DRM and anti-circumvention laws.
(And as far as books are concerned, e-readers are crap for anything but linear text as far as I'm concerned.)
That being said, the majority of my media is digital these days. I even buy pure digital copies of my console games. It's very convenient, but as an investment it's practically worthless. The formats for this stuff are not universal and require special hardware to use them. I've bought Super Mario Bros. 3 at least 4 or 5 times in my life. I still have my copy of the Lord of the Rings that I've read 4 or 5 times in my life and it required no special hardware or work arounds. I wouldn't have to have bought that game so many times if emulators and backups were fully legal.
The technology is awesome. We're just not ready as a society yet to commit to it.
So it makes sense that digital is cheaper. But relying on its cheapness doesn't make sense since there is no guarantee that digital will stay cheaper once more people switch.
Questions for Jeff Bezos
Q: What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub? A: I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.
Q: What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub? A: If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.
!! DISCLAIMER - I've not been brave enough to try this with my iPad2 yet
If someone comes up with a water proof cover for popular e-reader models, surely there would be a market for it.