

The Digital Divide - How Digital Sales are Taking Over Amazon - maxcho
http://maxcho.com/2011/04/the-dividing-line/

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edw
As more and more of what we need and want becomes virtual and the virtual
things more and more become things that are streamed, it seems that we're
approaching a "subscription economy."

From time to time I think about what I'd take out of my place if I had five
minutes before it burst into flames. Here's what I think I'd take today:

* Envelope with important financial documents.

* MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.

* Surly Steamroller (my fixie).

I either don't care about or could easily replace everything else in my
apartment. I wouldn't replace _any_ of my few dozen DVDs gathering dust on my
bookshelves. As far as vinyl goes, I probably wouldn't replace any of my
fifty-or-so 12 and 7-inches. I might replace a dozen of the thousand or so
books I own. Everything else are legacy assets that I'd more properly call
liabilities.

I am interested to see what happens in the next decade or so. I see things
through a particular—and some may say peculiar—prism, but I see a world where
people will sort themselves into one of two groups:

* People who have given up on the ideology of stuff.

* People who cling—conceptually and literally—to stuff.

To get comfortable living in a city is to get comfortable letting go of stuff.
I no longer have to spend hundreds of dollars a month to pay people to care
for my yard. I just pay a bit more in taxes and can easily take advantage of
one of the world's most beautiful urban park systems. My apartment is a small,
relatively rough loft, but it's cheap, and I use the money I don't spend on
rent or a mortgage to go out.

The thing I most want to avoid losing are "things" like health insurance, my
ability to communicate with people, and the ability to read books. All of
these things have become virtualized, and most of them are or are moving in
the direction of be subscriptionized.

I look forward to the day when my life is sufficiently virtualized so that my
personal, physical possessions can fit in my messenger bag. And when the sum
of my digital possessions are the words and source code I've written, the
pictures I've taken, the things I've actually produced.

When that day comes, I'll be able to drop into any major city with nothing but
a messenger bake and a bike at nine in the morning and by noon be ready for
anything.

~~~
evangineer
Over the last three years, I've come to a similar viewpoint. Stuff has to be
stored, maintained and moved. I'm quite ambiguous however about subscriptions
and the Age of Access though: <http://www.foet.org/books/age-access.html>

~~~
edw
I'm torn myself. Part of me wants to own a copy of let's say _Rushmore_ , but
the rational part of me thinks it's ridiculous, especially because I have no
desire to watch it right now. Maybe we live in the Age of Reference, where
it's not the possession of the thing but the ability to refer someone to it,
that is important. (That's perhaps a way of saying that we now live in a
permanent Age of the Hipster.)

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patio11
Amazon is a very data oriented company, and one can reasonably expect this to
get tested to death. As one data point, I have been using Amazon since the
bubble, and they sold me more books in 2010 via the Kindle than they did in
our first ten years together. I expect that the margins were substantially
more attractive, too.

We are not at the tipping point yet for deadtreeBooks, but I do not think we
are far.

