I am too old for the new world order. I might even be a closet luddist, which I resent because I do love my Internet. In fact, the Internet pays my bills if you consider who my employer is. I should be all in favour of new digital stuff; a technology enthusiast.
That is not me, though. I am never first in line for new, cool stuff. Not second in line, either. If you looked for me in the line, you would in fact not see me there at all. I tend to trundle up at the end of the second or third line, sometimes even later. I don't arrive late to the party, I don't show up until well into the nachspiel. (Or, in the case of the MiniDisc, straight to the empty, washed-out morning after.)
I have an iPhone. For a year after aquiring it, I regretted the whole thing. I wasn't the type of user it was intended for; mostly because I refused to sully my laptop with iTunes and was (and am still) angry that I couldn't create an iTunes account via the iPhone and do all the downloads etc. from the same phone. Why, why, why should I need to hook it up to my laptop?! It's a tiny computer, it should behave like one! Eventually, though, I succumbed, which means I now have a few neat apps. It is very useful to have one-button access to various online newspapers when I'm waiting around in restaurants or wherever and don't want to engage in people-watching.
I've even put some music on it! Music! On the iPhone! Will wonders never cease? I mean, I have a proper mp3 player that holds my entire CD collection, but I wanted to try what it was like to have music on my phone. So I did.
And that leads me to the whole point of this ramble:
Buying digital content. Music, books, movies, tv-series -- it's all out there. Although the two latter might not yet be as widely spread as books and music, I'm sure it's only a matter of time. I can already rent movies over the cable, which I am genuinely enthusiastic about. But I digress.
Buying digital content. Lots of people do it. Lots of people do it a lot, especially after Amazon came up with Kindle, making e-books readable for real. I, on the other hand, have trouble with the whole concept. Bits and bytes aren't real. At best, they're copies of something that is real; like a proper printed book, or a CD, or, if you're a decade or two older than me, a vinyl record. But an mp3 file or an e-book? Not real. Not proper. Not a physical object I can hold in my hands, turn this way and that, sniff and poke at. My cats cannot chew sleepily on the corner of a digital book when they snooze in my lap. Yes, yes, I know it's a terrible thing to imagine -- a cat chewing on your book! The horror! But they are so very, very cute when they do it, so I just can't be cross with them.
Anyway. As you can imagine, I don't buy a lot of e-stuff. A typical example is that the only album I have that is mp3 only is a purely experimental purchase. I'd heard one song with the band, and decided to try this iTunes thing. I mean, it wasn't a serious purchase because it was only files! Not a real CD. It still cost real money, but much less than the CD would have. The other albums I have on my iPhone, I also have in my CD shelf. I like going to the record store and exit with a real object made of real plastic in my hands, thank you very much. (One of these days, I'm going to join the century of whatever comes after the fruitbat and go to an adult funstore and exit with another real object made or real plastic, but that's a story for another time!)
At least I have bought mp3s. I grant you, it's seductively easy. Especially if you're on a good connection and the files come floating to you from iTunesland or wherever at high speed. But....they remain the unreal stepchildren of my music collection.
Books are even worse. I absolutely love the idea of never running out of shelf space for books. Honestly, I do, that's part of why I'm so happy about renting movies on the cable - no more buying movie DVDs unless it's one I intend to watch many many times! But again, an e-book isn't real. With a Kindle, I wouldn't have to worry about weight or space in my luggage when I go travelling and need reading material. But they'd be ghost books. I wouldn't have a physical copy to show for my purchase and what if it got deleted? To delete a real book, I'd have to take it out of the shelf and get rid of it (I occasionally do, if a book offends or bores me enough). To delete a ghost book, I'd only need to press a button -- or the nightmare: I'd log on to wherever it is ghost books live, and the proprietor of that place would delete it because of some mysterious legal reason. They can't do that with real books. They can't come to my home and take my books away, but in the digital world of e-books, that is entirely possible.
Also, I feel weird paying the same or almost the same for a digital file as for a physical copy. And I know that's stupid, because the author or musician(s) work just as hard at creating their work, no matter how it's sold and in what form. I know that most of the procuction costs happen before you get to printing and shipping, so they'll be relevant for digital copies as well as physical ones. But I still drag my feet. I still wrinkle my nose and object to paying money for a purely digital product. My reluctance hinges on the real vs. ghost "conflict", and it's all in my head. Mostly. There is the issue of how the industries have imposed borders on the Internet where there used to be none. I could rant forever about it, but I shall be brief: Restricting the availability of a digital file to a country or a region is bullshit. End of story.
So what will I do the day the CD dies?
What will I do the day printed books become wildly expensive because nobody buys them anymore?
Listen to the same old songs? Re-read the same old books?
Of course not. I will succumb just like everyone else and pray that sunstorms won't kill my connection to the Internet while I curse the evil pricks who won't let me buy whatever new album or whichever new book because I live on the wrong IP block.
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