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Last week I signed up for an account at audible.com, a digital audio books website, and with my membership I swept away the last remaining part of physical media in my life.
I grew up in the Napster age. I'm one of those burdens on society that doesn't pay for music because I've never known the necessity to do so. I'll kick Radiohead a couple bucks when they let me pick what I want to pay and I'll throw down good money for concert tickets, but seldom do I want a CD and decide that I've got to run to Best Buy and grab a copy of a new release. Yeah, the physicality of a booklet is nice, but I'm just gonna rip it to my iPod anyway and my sister's gonna let the CD get scratched in her car... not worth it. If I do decide to buy, it's in a MP3 that finds a nice spot to rest on my hard drive.
Movies were a little different. I'm not big on watching anything on my computer, I didn't care for the variable download time across BitTorrent, and the quality was too much of a gamble, so I bought or rented. Then NetFlix happened and now I simply rent.
Books were what remained. When I wasn't as busy as I am today I got tremendous pleasure from walking into a bookstore, taking home a couple of paperbacks, and spending the summer polishing off my investments. There was something tactiley satisfying about flipping pages, about holding the progress in my left hand and the what remains in my right. A book shelf of great reads with worn covers and dog eared corners was a badge I possessed, a trophy case of literature.
Recently the only reading I've accomplished comes at intervals of flights and durations measured in mechanical problems and weather delays. My list of must reads continues to grow while my list of what's read remains unchanged. This is what prompted my new membership with audible. I figured 18 or so hours at work each month can be afforded to listen to a book rather than my normal cocktail of music and podcasts.
I had my hesitations. The price for a monthly membership is double the cost of a paper back. Yet, in this situation, my desire to be cheap wasn't the largest of my hurdles. I had to convince myself that I'd be ok without my literature trophies, that it'd be ok to finish a novel and have nothing but my memory to show for it.
It wasn't easy, but I overcame my dreads because in reality, it's the future.
Hard drives have replaced almost every example of physical media. Photo albums are all but dead, soon to be replaced by digital picture frames (once they stop looking so chintzy). The iTunes store phenomenon has been replaced by the iTunes store having become far too commonplace to be labeled a phenomenon. And even though the most recent winner of the format wars, Blu-Ray, has yet to have it's heyday, I think it will become a thing of the past far more quickly than any of its predecessors due to the surge in online streaming video content we're seeing today (more on that later).
It would seem foolish to exclude print from the list of doomed physical media. Websites have replaced newspapers, blogs updates have replaced press releases, it's only a matter of time before audio and eBooks replace books (just take a look at the Kindle). The transition will difficult and slow, but it's how things have evolved and how they will continute to evolve.
If Apple has anything to say about it you'll soon walk in to your friend's living room and where you once browsed through the bindings in their bookcases you'll instead drag your finger across a screen and experience their library in cover flow mode.
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