
Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here. - srikar
http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/04/physical-media-has-to-go-im-digital.html
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pstack
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.

~~~
patio11
_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._

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

~~~
neild
_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.

~~~
stuhacking
On the other hand (and I'm slightly playing Devil's advocate here), books and
other physical media go out of print eventually. It can become difficult to
find a copy of some archaic technical manual that interests you. (Anyone
selling any Symbolics manuals? :-))

There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a
digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)

~~~
jokermatt999
Honestly, I think this is one of the best use cases for piracy. There may be
no money in putting out a Symbolics manual, but it costs a pirate uploading a
digital version almost nothing. Look at older video game emulation as well.
It's probably not worth it to the companies to continue to put out the type of
games that wind up on abandonware sites, but thanks to dedicated fans who
pirate them, they wind up preserved for future generations.

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jbri
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.

~~~
riffraff
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 :)

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
dman
Agree with everything you said but Book index quality has been going down
pretty sharply off late. For some tech books I read recently the index was
basically the function calls from the code samples and the Section headings.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's not limited to programming books, more's the pity.

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

~~~
wladimir
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...](http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#OCR)

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uast23
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.

------
agentultra
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.

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dman
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.

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nodata
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.

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stef25
Personally I like to take my eyes away from a screen every now and then. Books
FTW.

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

~~~
robgough
I thought people were just putting them inside large sandwich bags?

!! DISCLAIMER - I've not been brave enough to try this with my iPad2 yet

~~~
robin_reala
Guess that’d work but yep, would be a little frightening. Seems like an
obvious thing for the Kindle to get though. Give it wifi/3G for data transfer
and Touchstone (or equivalent) for power transfer, and you don’t need a single
port. Then just seal the case up.

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Jabbles
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".

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cabalamat
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"?

