Clutter

Some good points in there, particularly as far as books go. Something similar applies to music, in that:

* there is more of a tendency to go for immediate satisfaction than for challenging listening as we flick through the large amount of available music to find things we like

* we move away from listening to music an experience (including the disc as an object, the cover art, and the visual associations it can create) and consuming music as more of a commodity

In summary, the high availability of content online means that the content itself is devalued. The availability is great, but it's a shame if the increase in range affects depth.

Absolutely... I digitized my CD collection years ago and threw away those useless jewel cases (CDs themselves fit neatly in a couple of Case Logic binders) - I never looked back and am living happily CD-free: good riddance, plastic; I digitized my class notes from school; I digitized all the biz cards, little notes and other specs of paper using the on-board camera of my Macbook Pro and the PhotoBooth app (later on I can run an OCR character recognition program on those biz card images): No more clutter!!!

Considering books... I still own a fair bit of books and enjoy them very much, but in the future I could imagine certain more reference type books to be strictly digital.

I also enjoy my vinyl records and putting them on a manual old-school record player. But I have digital backups of all vinyl, because they wear down with use.

As they say: the future is "high-tech as well as high-touch"

I've been reading novels electronically on my computer/palm/nintendo ds for years and I completely disagree with him... I don't feel an inch of difference between reading a book electronically or in book form, it's still the same kind of immersive experience that can keep me out of this world for a few hours and forget to eat, sleep or anything else around.

Yes, there might be the possibility of adding hypertext to books but does it mean it will be used? I don't think books will change because of the introduction of a new medium.

This reminds me of the PG essay "Stuff": http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

That essay changed the way I think about "things", and since reading it a few years ago I've sold, donated, or thrown away a lot of things that were simply taking up shelf space. It really does help free your mind from the clutter.

some of books i like are in google books, like 'the china study'

and of course, there are rapidshare and torrents

it doesn't make sense to digitize books i already have where i can fetch those using above tricks

for newest stuff, there is certain lag (at least a year) before prog language, manga, health book, etc becomes widespread enough to guarantee paper audience

now i rarely go to bookstore and while there, never buy single book simply because there's nothing new in there

actually i don't like physical book because i can't copy paste the important stuff to my One personal log file

and of course, there's an issue with paper searching (i can always grep regex my One personal log file)