The Digital Divide - How Digital Sales are Taking Over Amazon | Hacker News Reader

The Digital Divide - How Digital Sales are Taking Over Amazon

maxcho.com

17 pointsmaxcho4 comments

As more and more of what we need and want becomes virtual and the virtual things more and more become things that are streamed, it seems that we're approaching a "subscription economy."

From time to time I think about what I'd take out of my place if I had five minutes before it burst into flames. Here's what I think I'd take today:

* Envelope with important financial documents.

* MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.

* Surly Steamroller (my fixie).

I either don't care about or could easily replace everything else in my apartment. I wouldn't replace any of my few dozen DVDs gathering dust on my bookshelves. As far as vinyl goes, I probably wouldn't replace any of my fifty-or-so 12 and 7-inches. I might replace a dozen of the thousand or so books I own. Everything else are legacy assets that I'd more properly call liabilities.

I am interested to see what happens in the next decade or so. I see things through a particular—and some may say peculiar—prism, but I see a world where people will sort themselves into one of two groups:

* People who have given up on the ideology of stuff.

* People who cling—conceptually and literally—to stuff.

To get comfortable living in a city is to get comfortable letting go of stuff. I no longer have to spend hundreds of dollars a month to pay people to care for my yard. I just pay a bit more in taxes and can easily take advantage of one of the world's most beautiful urban park systems. My apartment is a small, relatively rough loft, but it's cheap, and I use the money I don't spend on rent or a mortgage to go out.

The thing I most want to avoid losing are "things" like health insurance, my ability to communicate with people, and the ability to read books. All of these things have become virtualized, and most of them are or are moving in the direction of be subscriptionized.

I look forward to the day when my life is sufficiently virtualized so that my personal, physical possessions can fit in my messenger bag. And when the sum of my digital possessions are the words and source code I've written, the pictures I've taken, the things I've actually produced.

When that day comes, I'll be able to drop into any major city with nothing but a messenger bake and a bike at nine in the morning and by noon be ready for anything.

Over the last three years, I've come to a similar viewpoint. Stuff has to be stored, maintained and moved. I'm quite ambiguous however about subscriptions and the Age of Access though: http://www.foet.org/books/age-access.html

I'm torn myself. Part of me wants to own a copy of let's say Rushmore, but the rational part of me thinks it's ridiculous, especially because I have no desire to watch it right now. Maybe we live in the Age of Reference, where it's not the possession of the thing but the ability to refer someone to it, that is important. (That's perhaps a way of saying that we now live in a permanent Age of the Hipster.)

Amazon is a very data oriented company, and one can reasonably expect this to get tested to death. As one data point, I have been using Amazon since the bubble, and they sold me more books in 2010 via the Kindle than they did in our first ten years together. I expect that the margins were substantially more attractive, too.

We are not at the tipping point yet for deadtreeBooks, but I do not think we are far.

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