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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

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pembrook·

This is true for all products.

How much of your closet is filled with stuff you haven’t worn in at least a year.

How much of your freezer is full of stuff you’ll never eat.

How many of the books on your bookshelf will you actually read before you die?

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I find for physical objects, I’m much more likely to actually use them. I have read 95+% of the physical books in my house, wear 90+% of my clothes in any given year, 95+% of the food I buy. Mainly because I’m physically limited to buying/owning a certain number of things before I run out of space. With a 150TB NAS and at least 4TB of local storage in each of my PCs (and the fact you don’t even need to download a game to buy it), it’s a lot easier to hoard digital items without using them.

Physical books (and games) sit there on a shelf and you're occasionally remind you that you bought them and maybe should read/play them.

Items in a digital library seem much easier to completely and utterly forget about.

True, but on the flip side, items in a digital library generally don't have to be paid for and put there until you're about to use them for the first time, making it a little stranger that they never even get booted up.

Everyone's different, but at least for me, I don't buy a game with the hope I'll find time to play it sometime in the next month, I buy it when I'm ready to start playing it, like right now.

I'll bet kitchen tools are big on this. How many people buy a specialized appliance like a bread maker and then use it once or never at all? If you don't use something regularly, it's easy for it to end up tucked away in a cabinet where you never think of it again.

eBooks and audiobooks are even worse than paper books in that regard. Environmentally much better though!

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