When you can get more movies and television than you could ever consume for only $8/mo and ten million songs for only $5/mo, it's hard to argue. I mean, would you rather pay $30 for a Bluray that you'll watch once (twice, to be generous) or spend that $30 on almost four months of on-demand content? Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music?

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.