Musings on physical media

So prescient

I was just reading about how Fantastic Mr. Fox is coming out on DVD/Blu-ray next month, and thinking that I was probably going to have to pick it up.  Then I got to thinking about the last movie I bought for myself on DVD.  I couldn’t remember what it was.  So I searched my email, and fittingly enough, it looks like it was The Darjeeling Limited, fully two years ago.  I’ve gotten some DVDs and Blu-rays since then for Christmas or gifts, but I think it’s pretty telling.  It seems like DVDs are going the same way CDs did five years ago.  No one really cares about having the physical thing anymore if you can easily download it legally or illegally, or stream it, or get it delivered to your door whenever you want it.  Nowadays it’s about as easy to download movies and shows as it was to download music 10 years ago.

When I moved last year I boxed up all my movies, and then unboxed them, but I don’t even really touch them or use them that much.  They just take up space on a shelf, a lot of space actually.  There aren’t that many movies I own that I haven’t already seen enough times to feel like I need to bring them out ever.  This is pretty telling too: the other week I watched Seven Samurai.  I own the Criterion Collection version of it on DVD.  But did I watch that version?  No, I streamed it from Netflix.  I don’t know why I did that, was I really too lazy to get up and find the movie and put it in the player?  I watched Big Trouble in Little China a few months ago.  Did I watch the special edition DVD that I’ve had for 6-7 years?  No, I put the new Blu-ray version in my Netflix queue, and waited a couple days for it to arrive, then watched it.

This has got me thinking about books.  Books are probably the only things I own that take up more space than my DVDs, besides clothes I guess (but I use my clothes a lot more on a regular basis).  Like my DVDs, my books just sit there almost all of the time.  How many books will I go back and read again?  Some, surely, but not most.  Maybe it says something about human nature, or at least my nature, to collect things we like.  Back to books though: it seems pretty clear that in the next five years things in the book world are going to move in the same direction music and movies have moved over the last 10 years.  There’s a lot to debate here, but at some point they have to make it more convenient to download an eBook than to order a physical book online.  I think if you’d have asked me 10 years ago if I would have ever wanted to get rid of my physical CDs I would have said no, and the same thing five years ago for my DVDs.  But now I don’t really care.  So somewhere along the line there has been a change in my thinking.  And this change is what is prompting me to want to get content from places like Netflix or the internet, even if I already have the content in physical form.

I think one of the biggest differences with books though is that there is no easy way to convert your existing library of books into a digital format.  This wasn’t a problem with music and movies (I ripped most of my CDs a long time ago and never looked back, although I haven’t ripped all my DVDs because there are now so many other ways to get the content I want).  So maybe the solution is to come up with some sort of subscription based on-demand solution for books.  Maybe people won’t mind paying some amount of money a month to access a large library of written content.  The biggest barrier to entry for me with this whole eBook thing is that I have so many books already, I don’t want to re-buy all the books I like in order to get them on the same device as the new books I buy electronically.  Also the fact that I balk at paying full price for 90% of the books I end up getting.  The beauty of books is that you can get them used for pennies on the dollar.  So if I could pay a monthly subscription fee to access a large library of books, it would effectively be like carrying my entire bookshelf with me because I could read what I want whenever I want.

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