The Demise of Physical Media

What are people going to do with all those shelves they once used for books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and photo albums? It was somehow comforting and reassuring to have that media lining the walls – a historical accumulation of life, reading, listening and viewing habits over who knows how many years. But the digital world has been eating away at this tangible collection for years.

CDs were the first casualty. It seems for many people iTunes has now become the de facto repository for storing (and buying) music. It doesn’t take up any physical space, and it is a lot easier to find and access the music you want. Of course, people – especially the audiophiles – will cling dearly to those jewel boxes for years, but they can only gather dust for so many years before people part with them. Another exception will be collectors who revel in the material form and perceived quality of the “old” media rather than the convenience or functional attributes of the digital form.

People’s DVD collections, and the even newer Blu-ray discs, also seem destined for eventual oblivion when you read stories like this one. If you can eventually download or stream any movie you want, anytime you want it, and at a reasonable price from your TV programming provider or others, it will be difficult for physical media to compete. It’s cheaper to ship electrons than stuff.

Photo albums – at least in book form – seem threatened, too. For many people, albums are now only in digital form, residing exclusively on their laptops or smart phones. That’s understandable because you can then show anybody, anything, anytime, but it’s bad if your photos are one catastrophic hard drive crash from oblivion. If all your precious memories are in digital form, please back them up before that inevitable day when you notice something is terribly wrong with your computer. While digital photos may be more convenient, future generations will not have the pleasure of what many consider a unique luxury – digging through boxes of old family photos from generations back and holding in your hand a precious paper-based image as a tangible piece of ancestral history.

With the growing use of ebook readers, it also seems reasonable to assume those venerated shelves that now contain your books will eventually need to be repurposed. A Kindle DX can hold thousands of books, and while the pleasure and utility of reading on any ebook reader can be hotly debated, it seems only a matter of time before some future iteration of these devices eventually surpasses the user experience and usefulness of a physical book. Even now, an ebook purchased via wireless network and electronic reader can be accessed in minutes. That’s a big pull for a society that values instant gratification.

Of course something will be lost in this transition from the old to the new. Having your media in physical form brings a certain undeniable comfort and assurance. These are songs, books and movies that have reached out to touch you in some way. Why shouldn’t you be able to reach out and touch them? Well, maybe you still will be able to do that, but chances are you’ll have to climb up in the dim light of the attic to find them in a remote corner where the home’s previous generation allotted space to precious boxes of Life magazine and LP record albums that, at the time, were too cherished to let go. Perhaps they still are.