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Comment by beowulfey | Hacker News Reader

It probably marks the beginning of the end for the medium though

There was quite the kerfuffle around the Internet Archive and their controlled lending efforts wrt books online. The disappearance of media formats that could be physically lent out and the total lack of media owners being willer to offer the same digitally was the risk they were attempting to mitigate.

Culture dies when libraries can't lend it (which they can today due to first sale doctrine applicable to physical media, whether books, DVDs, etc), and it's locked behind digital rights and streaming portals (where first sale doctrine does not apply). When physical media dies, you'll either be a consumer willing to pay "whatever the market will bear" for your temporary license (books, music, video, whatever), or a pirate. Archives can still accumulate culture for safekeeping (physically and digitally), it'll just be inaccessible to the public for a century or two sliding window into the past based on current flavor of copyright statute insanity.

https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...

To me it looks more like a continuation of the decline of brick and mortar retail. Even if I want to watch films on blue-ray, why would I ever want to drive to a Best Buy to purchase them?

Browsing an enormous shelf of hundreds (at peak thousands) of films is a much better way to find new things than clicking "Next" 5-20 at a time and trying to parse a tiny thumbnail with a probably half-corrupted title.

Because you can have it now and not in three days?

Sometimes urgency is a factor.

If I really must have something right now, I'm highly unlikely to spend 30 minutes plus to drive to the nearest Best Buy to purchase a physical disc. And I don't think that's atypical. I have to believe the most common pattern for someone to buy physical media at a local store is that they're in the store for some other reason and they see a disc for a movie they want to watch.

Interesting… why wouldn’t you? Do you live far from one?

I love going to Best Buy (and most stores), but maybe that’s just because it was great growing up with them as a source for all things electronic.

Personally I get more joy from browsing stores in person compared to browsing digitally. It becomes something to do—an event of sorts. We exist in the physical world; the digital world is less satisfying to my other senses.

Because of overall efficiencies in carbon emissions and packaging waste when things are delivered by a palette load to a local-to-you retailer rather than individually packaged to be sent directly to homes?

Steam was the beginning of the end for physical media, it got the ball rolling on normalizing for a whole generation the lack of media ownership.

I think the beginning of the end happened already when streaming became commonplace.

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