Friday, April 25, 2008

Save Those Media

Ever wish you had saved old comic books, incandescent light bulbs, eight-track tapes, 45rpm records, and other collectors' items? The trend is not going to abate any time soon. With broadband internet, and even faster speeds on the horizon, printed books, music CD's, and movie DVD's are slated for the trash bin. Everything will be downloaded, streamed, and torrented. Why bother with expensive permanent media when computer storage can be distributed, taken with you, or transferred almost instantly from place to place?

The greatest obstacle to universal computerized media storage is property rights. We still need to sell individual units before allowing people to consume them, but commerce always finds a way to cope with technology. Those old paperbacks will not just be used books, they will be items of nostalgia, with a smell of old books, and the feel of rough pages, long gone, but not forgotten. How long before the paperback book industry dies? Twenty years, tops.

2 comments:

Ars longa, vita brevis said...

no, real books will not dissapear cause they are still more practical (take one to the beach and dont care if it gets sand all over) from pdas and digital readers....

Johnguru said...

seena, I hope you're right. I like books.