Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here.

http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/04/physical-media-has-to-go-im-digital.html

by srikar • 15 years ago

35 54 15 years ago

blog.louisgray.com

jbri2• 15 years ago

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.

Even for reference materials, ebooks still seem like the bastard child of a reference textbook and a proper hyperlinked manual.

louismg3• 15 years ago

The argument could similarly be made for watching feature films on a TV set with surround sound versus a theater. Ebooks aren't as beautiful (yet) as their hardback cousins, but they are instant, portable, and greener to boot!

pstack3• 15 years ago

Also, you don't have to worry about your pages becoming dog-eared. Or getting finger-grease or smudges on them. Or spines being worn or bent. If you grew up a book nerd, just thinking about these things happening to a physical book can make you squirm. With an eBook, the most you need is a cloth to wipe your reader display!

Also, there's definitely something to be said not only for carrying your book around on a light device, but carrying up to thousands of them around on a single light device. (Though, on the other hand, how often are you going to need to go back and read most of your non-reference books after you've finished them?).

riffraff• 15 years ago

I'm afraid it's the nostalgia talking, and we are dinosaurs. I do find interesting that very little people feel attached to tape/VHS/CDROM/DVDs though, while there are plenty who will swear that books in dead tree form are better than digital media.

Then again, I don't know how to write a love note on the front page of ebooks I'm giving as gift, and they are still not bathtub-compliant :)

anigbrowl2• 15 years ago

Not yet it isn't. Most of the books I own are bigger than the pocket-paperback size the Kindle and competitors use. When there's a magazine-size screen with slightly faster switching, then I'll jump on it.

I also find navigating a book-length document on a laptop or something quite tedious. When I'm reading a complex book (where I often want to refer to the index, endnotes, or photographs) I will often have several fingers folded in at the relevant pages and can jump around quite quickly.

jbri2• 15 years ago

I think the difference there is that all of those are just storage devices - you can't just look at a DVD and see the movie, you already need a playback device in order to watch it. Given that, playing it back on the same device without having any external storage media is basically just cutting out the middleman.

Introducing a playback device (such as going from book -> Kindle + ebook) is quite different, I think.

Raphael2• 15 years ago

Torrent in epub format. Open it up (it's just a zip). Edit HTML to your satisfaction, and re-zip.

rmc2• 15 years ago

I recently got a Kindle and I'm convinced. It's the future. I'm reading much much books. Reading on a Kindle is superiour to reading a dead tree.

Tyrannosaurs• 15 years ago

I used to think this until I got a Kindle - I was almost determined that it wouldn't be as good as paper - but I now find it infuriating when I can't get something as an eBook.

For novels the difference (for me at least) is that the Kindle makes it easier to focus on actually reading.

I was surprised by this but turning a page is a small nudge of the thumb and your focus remains on the text, the device is light enough that holding it in the same position for an extended period or getting comfortable in bed or in a chair is far easier than for a book (even a paperback - and the difference between the Kindle and a hardback or trade paperback isn't even funny). Small barriers that you weren't even really aware of that are either taken away or noticeably reduced.

Of course there's all the additional stuff - buying books instantly nearly anywhere, carrying a whole library in your pocket and so on - but they turn out to be bells and whistles. The real difference is that it's just a better device for consuming text.

For reference books (at least large ones) the Kindle isn't there yet (layout, searching, colour and a few other key things) but without having hands on experience I can see the iPad could well remove most of those issues at which point searching and electronic notes, combined with reduced bulk (the iPad is heavy but not next to a 500 page programming book) likely give it an edge over paper.

pstack3• 15 years ago

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

louismg3• 15 years ago

All good points. The issue we're facing with DRM, upgradability etc is similar to that faced with moving from LPs to Cassettes to CDs to MP3s to...

Books decay. Digital files get corrupted. Companies rise and fall. I know I'll end up buying things more than once, just like I did with my Depeche Mode collection - at least three times.

pstack3• 15 years ago

That's one of the big points of contention, for me. If I am purchasing a digital copy of your content, then I am essentially purchasing nothing but a license to use that content and it should therefore be your job to ensure I can continue to access that content for the rest of my life (or longer, if we figure out the whole management of digital copies of things so I can give my library to my nephew when I die or something).

When you are changing the physical media, it's a little more understandable (even though you're still really just giving me a license to the content on it and nothing else). When it's already in digital format, it's no longer acceptable to play that sucker's game, as far as I'm concerned.

dools2• 15 years ago

My problem with "digital decay" is that it's much more "binary" - it's working or it's completely unusable. When the reception gets fuzzy on digital TV, you simply can't watch the station where as an analog signal has varying levels of decay.

If you have a hard drive full of images and it fails, it's all gone (better have a backup!), but if you have a box full of photos and your house floods, some of them may still be around.

Analog fades, digital dies, unless it's constantly resuscitated. When you think about it how many times have you found an old photo that you probably wouldn't have kept if you had the choice? Or some old photos or music at your grandparent's house.

What are my grand kids going to find at my house?

patio11• 15 years ago

This seems a lot of work in a world where most content, and most popular content, is disposable by design.

mirkules3• 15 years ago

It certainly makes you wonder about how this civilization is going to be viewed in the future. How are we going to leave traces of our civilization for future civilizations to find and decode? I suspect that the riddles of Egyptian hieroglyphics are going to be pale in comparison to decoding DVD information, for example. Moreover, how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put?

neild• 15 years ago

This seems a lot of work in a world where most content, and most popular content, is disposable by design.

The books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to...I really can't think of how any of it could be described as "disposable by design".

I read a book written in 1966 the other day. That's young by the standards of literature, and yet it's older than I am.

Netflix's entire business model is built on movies not having an expiration date.

And to call music "disposable" is a statement that I don't even know how to respond to.

rflrob• 15 years ago

> Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music?

I'm picky about my music, so I don't buy new CDs that often, but when I do, it's usually for an artist I really like. When I have the opportunity, it's at a show for that artist, which hopefully means that they're getting a larger chunk of that $15 than it would if I buy it elsewhere.

Music and books are, of the media you listed, the ones where you could conceivably have a dinner party with all of the creative folks involved.

dman2• 15 years ago

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.

wladimir2• 15 years ago

Does anyone know of a Linux compatible archive system for scanned paper?

It doesn't really have to OCR, but should allow for tagging and searching.

I would really like to get rid of my stacks of old (administrative) paper, and the ones that I still receive through snailmail.

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.

viraptor• 15 years ago

I tried to find something and failed. Nowadays, I just upload to zoho apps and tag the documents there.

wladimir2• 15 years ago

That's a good option, I might consider that. The advantage is that it makes the documents accessible from everywhere.

On the other hand, as it is a cloud service, you have to trust them to keep the data. Do they make it possible to access/backup your documents through some API?

Hm I guess in that case I could simply use Google documents as well. Seems that it even (experimentally) supports OCR: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...

stef252• 15 years ago

Personally I like to take my eyes away from a screen every now and then. Books FTW.

grinich• 15 years ago

Have you tried the newest Kindle? I've found that I actually read more with it since it's so easy to carry around.

robin_reala2• 15 years ago

Can I carry it into the bath and read it there? I’m not sure why ebook reader manufacturers aren’t tapping this market.

stef252• 15 years ago

I spend so much time in front of screens that I refuse to buy another one.

louismg3• 15 years ago

I like the idea. I just never get to do it. :)

uast23• 15 years ago

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.

nodata• 15 years ago

Digital stuff is still fairly new - most people, at least until recently, preferred real world stuff.

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.

Jabbles• 15 years ago

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".

cabalamat• 15 years ago

Is there a name for the annoying pop-ups and stay-ups that go on the top and bottom of web pages these days? If not, may I nominate "dickbar"?

agentultra• 15 years ago

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.

I still cannot fathom owning one.

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.

(And as far as books are concerned, e-readers are crap for anything but linear text as far as I'm concerned.)

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.

The technology is awesome. We're just not ready as a society yet to commit to it.

Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here.

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