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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This is an interesting standpoint, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Ebooks have made vast strides recently, but there's just something about leafing through a book that they just can't seem to match. Perhaps it's the nostalgia talking, but reading a novel on a Kindle just seems a whole lot more sterile than an actual paperback.<p>Even for reference materials, ebooks still seem like the bastard child of a reference textbook and a proper hyperlinked manual.
Does anyone know of a Linux compatible archive system for scanned paper?<p>It doesn't really have to OCR, but should allow for tagging and searching.<p>I would really like to get rid of my stacks of old (administrative) paper, and the ones that I still receive through snailmail.<p>DVDs/CDs/books don't bother me as much, as they look nice, but those binders with crappy old paper I can't wait to throw it out.
Everything else was/is indeed destined to move to its digital form sooner or later no matter how much the physical good producer regrets it; but you cannot take it away from physical books. Ebooks are handy. They are portable, safe from wear and tear, cheap and what not. But what about those moments when you really need to take your eyes away off the screen but still want to be productive or have some quality time reading.
This might be just a personal POV, but over the time looking at screen becomes so usual that you need an extra physical thing to get that kick. In my case it's physical books.
I can imagine reading a linear text is quite unobtrusive on a Kindle. I got one for my mother and she loves it. The display on it is really crisp, it's light, and she has access to a vast library of books.<p>I still cannot fathom owning one.<p>Digital media has a lot of social issues to work out. A book doesn't come with a TOS or EULA. The media the story comes on doesn't require a special licensed reader from the book store. It doesn't come crippled with DRM and anti-circumvention laws.<p>(And as far as books are concerned, e-readers are crap for anything but linear text as far as I'm concerned.)<p>That being said, the majority of my media is digital these days. I even buy pure digital copies of my console games. It's very convenient, but as an investment it's practically worthless. The formats for this stuff are not universal and require special hardware to use them. I've bought Super Mario Bros. 3 at least 4 or 5 times in my life. I still have my copy of the Lord of the Rings that I've read 4 or 5 times in my life and it required no special hardware or work arounds. I wouldn't have to have bought that game so many times if emulators and backups were fully legal.<p>The technology is awesome. We're just not ready as a society yet to commit to it.
Ive been loving people and libraries going digital. I snagged several physical books that were out of print in the last year at prices I never imagined a couple of years back. examples - etudes for programmers, introduction to functional programming etc for < 20$'s. On Lisp for < 30 bucks still eludes me though.
Digital stuff is still fairly new - most people, at least until recently, preferred real world stuff.<p>So it makes sense that digital is cheaper. But relying on its cheapness doesn't make sense since there is no guarantee that digital will stay cheaper once more people switch.
What service fills the void that refusing to buy Blu-Rays opens? Saying "DVD quality is good enough" and using a streaming service is in the same line as "Paper books are good enough".