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Why Paper Books, DVDs, and CDs are superior to remotely hosted “digital media”


Ser Scot A Ellison

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4 minutes ago, Theda Baratheon said:

That’s not fair :( I buy lots of movies on amazon and YouTube digitally to keep. I do work in a dvd store so I do sometimes buy them as well but it’s just so much more convenient to have them available digitally.

It is absolutely not fair.  Yet, it’s happening.  

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This is why I find it funny when people say that illegal downloading is absolutely wrong. If I buy something completely legally and they just wipe it, of course I'm going to illegally download it. Once I tried to buy a song on iTunes, it screwed up and charged me three times without me getting the song. So I just illegally downloaded the album. 

I think it's got to be a healthy mix. I think we all love a book collection, but having worked three days in removals, a personal mini library is a right pain in the arse/back. People move more these days, right? I like my kindle mainly for reading in bed at night. I just want less stuff, and digital copies are so good for minimising space.

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Mostly I'm just tired of having to "upgrade" to new media formats every few years.  So much gets lost in the shuffle.  Though I do still have some Hendrix on my 3rd gen iPod that I burned to CD from a cassette recording of my Mom's Electric Ladyland vinyl album I made when I was a kid. 

Can we all just agree that mp3s are fine*, and stick with it for a while?  

 

*they're FINE!

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While I do have a vinyl collection I use Spotify 90% of the time.  I have cultivated a pretty killer classic country playlist, and I love to be able to just pick a genre and a random playlist.  Great for driving and podcasts too.

I have one of those little portable jbl Bluetooth speakers and it’s the best for being able to jam out whether I’m in the kitchen making food or working on something in the garage.   I can’t overstate how much I love the jbl / Spotify combination.  I tell my fiancé all the time that the jbl is one of the best purchases we’ve ever made.

Different story for books though.  I love the physical book.  I do have to do a purge every so often to prevent my house from gettting too cluttered, but between smart phones and work computers I spend enough time looking at screens.  I don’t think I’ll ever covert to digital books.

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I think services like Spotify are cool as long as you recognise them for what they are: temporary subscriptions. Once I terminate my Spotify account I will have absolutely nothing left from it. Same with Netflix. But on the other hand I don’t care so much. For me the trade-off is worth it. I appreciate the fact that I can have all the music in my phone with just a quick search, or a whole bunch of movies to choose from every night. 

Itunes seems to me like an inferior idea. You actually have to buy the songs and they can still wipe your entire collection remotely. 

Books are the shit though. I’ll never give up those.

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9 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The items I list cannot (I use “cannot” deliberately) be remotely deleted by the “hosting” organization:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/13/apple-is-deleting-bought-films-from-itunes-accounts-and-dont-expect-a-refund/amp/

Huh, actually, if you use the same business model for both "digital media" and the objects you list, the same problems can arise; to illustrate:

1) You "buy" access to a book at your local private library. Library then decides to ban that book (a more common occurence than you'd think)... you just have your item "remotely deleted"

2) You decide to store your digital item at home like you'd do for a book or cd, instead of trusting your library. Library decides to ban your item. You still have your digital media, like you still have your book.

bonus point: your house burns, your CDs and books and digital data just got locally deleted. You can however still get most of your digital media back, as copies are available remotely at no cost.

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Apple is practicing bad faith business, that sucks.

 

I have given up books though. As someone who has too much clutter in my life yet I love to pick up 2 or 3 new books every month, I love that I'm no longer accumulating more stuff. I love my Kindle! Books look pretty in cases and on shelves, I used to love to sit in my room and look at my books lined up nice and neat and attractive on the shelves. But if you only have a little room they don't look as pretty stacked to the ceiling and up the side of the case and only some of them will ever be read more than once, it's not worth it to just have them sitting taking up space and collecting dust.

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On the other hand, physical media can be lost, damaged, stolen or destroyed in ways that digital media can't: they're more bulky to store: they need more resources to produce: and they have several other disadvantages.

Different media have different advantages and disadvantages. It has always been so. 

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1 hour ago, mormont said:

they need more resources to produce. 

I am unconvinced by this. It's the same reasoning used for electric cars: they are green as long as you do not consider the energy production (even solar power uses petrol to build the panels, and we are even almost out of sand...), what the resources for the hardware are (rare earth minig is... not green) and what happens to the item once it reaches its obsolescence time (a tablet/reader will go to the bin I'd say 100x faster than a book, and while the book is bio-degradable and almost totally recyclable, tablets/readers are not)

 

ETA: fun fact from http://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloud-is-using-more-energy-than-you-think/

Quote

We already use 50% more energy to move bytes than we do to move planes in global aviation

 

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I think we have to be a bit careful what we are comparing though. While all the problems with electronics are noted, a Kindle/tablet can hold thousands of books (hundreds?). At any rate, the breakeven point for a e-reader is going to be in the 10s of books sustainability wise (there is a fair bit of literature out there, and the number will vary based on assumptions).

I'm not sure what the average number is that people currently stock on their devices, but the personal responsibility message I take home from this is not to buy a new tablet for just 5-10 books.

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13 hours ago, Errant Bard said:

Huh, actually, if you use the same business model for both "digital media" and the objects you list, the same problems can arise; to illustrate:

1) You "buy" access to a book at your local private library. Library then decides to ban that book (a more common occurence than you'd think)... you just have your item "remotely deleted"

 

I think you are using the wrong term there. Libraries "weed", "discard", or "de-accession" books all the time -- like individuals, they only have so much space and they don't keep forever materials that either aren't being used, or that are physically worn out. But at least in the USA it would be very rare for libraries to "ban" a book, which would imply they are removing something from their shelves because it is controversial.  As a profession librarians in the USA are the least likely people to want to get rid of something because it's controversial -- they celebrate "Banned Books Week" every year precisely by featuring books that have been controversial enough for someone to want to ban them, and books that end up on the National Library Association's "Banned Books List" are probably among the books LEAST likely to be weeded or discarded by most libraries. 

http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top100

https://bannedbooksweek.org/resources/

 

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22 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The items I list cannot (I use “cannot” deliberately) be remotely deleted by the “hosting” organization:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/13/apple-is-deleting-bought-films-from-itunes-accounts-and-dont-expect-a-refund/amp/

They've been doing this for years.  I bought some music and season 1 of weeds when I was in college and a few years out of college when I got a new PC and linked it to my apple account to finally listen/watch them again I was SOL.  No reference at all that I'd even purchased the content.

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Also, it's tough to roll a joint on a digital copy unless you have a tablet.  On the other hand I've rolled thousands of joints on book covers, album covers, even CD covers, and I used to store them in an empty cassette case in my pocket to prevent squishage.  

So at least there's that.

Not so easy to do on a *.pdf or a *.mp3 (ok mp3s are FINE!)

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