Protoss For discs I expect an end in the next 20 to 50 years (note that in my opinion there will be other transportable media, though, but the retail system will quite die out in favor of companies that send on order what can't be downloaded - only basics will stay like supermarkets), for books in around 50 to 200 years. I think every human will have easy access to online banking by then (the VeriChip will fail btw but there are other security methods).

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Tulivu
[fullquote]
Just wait for food to go digital.

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Trilarion
[quote of my posting]
I see it similarly although I am unsure about the time frame. Maybe lovers of books might want to keep them forever. And they have certain advantages like instant access.

However I think that two issues will become very important. One is ownership. We should actually also legally allow the "ownership" of a copy of a media content (like a song or a game or a book). I mean that there should be no time limitations or personal bindings, i.e. you can resell them or pass them on. Also free (open source) players should be available. For interactive media like multiplayer games there will obviously be problems and also software in general requires operating systems... so software has additional problems, but books or music are pretty straight forward. I hate the amazon kindle that can delete content on its own. That is unacceptable!

Connected to this issue of ownership is how to verify that you are an owner? How can you be sure that something belongs to you, if it is not physically present, if everything is in a cloud and you have only an access key? You must trust the system, but such things should not be built on trust but on open, verifiable, transparent ways. I guess there is no ultimate solution because electronic systems will always be more easy to manipulate, but you said there are other better ways. So I would be interested to get to know them.
Post edited 8 hours ago by Trilarion

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NEW: My reply to Trilarion

I'm not sure, maybe they will use an Iris scanner. Things like these are already used in very high security terminals.

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First three postings: Copied from the thread: "Last month's DRM free releases". It would be nice if a mod could move the postings to this new thread so we don't spam the other one!

A bit of a sad notion for those who like to collect and preserve things they enjoy. The "good old days" part of me fights with the internal technology fan, and finds disappointment in both approaches.

you can burn your games to the flashdrive, cd
i don't see a reason why it should not be possible to do that in the future even if everything is streamed.

TBH, I don't think things like books will ever disappear. There's just too many bibliophiles in the world for that to happen.
Probably the same with comics.

I can see games and music and films going completely on-line....but the infrastructure of the many ISPs are going to need a severe overhaul very soon - faster, more capacity lines at the very least.

Kind of pathetic that here in the UK, many people are struggling to get 2Mb (~230KB) download speeds. Most packages available are in the order of 20-40GB per month. Some offer 100GB. Even fewer "unlimited" downloads (even less without "fair usage" provisos)...

Same crap here, but there is a change in the wind.

The ISP I'm currently using, is starting to offer 20-40 mbps download rate optical connection, no up / down limits. Funny, they get that through other ISPs in Bulgaria.

Try pulling cable from France or Norway, maybe you'll get a better connection. :p

Well, an "exclusively digital distribution" future is just bullshit. And for a good load of reasons I have no time to list here. Just a fact: redundancy of physical goods assures you won't lost all of your purchases when a Hard Drive fries.

Backup copies my ass.....

Yeah, we get around 2Mb/s here in London, but every so often it crawls - last night I was getting 0.24Mb/s. It's much quicker during the day though, since most people are at work. Before using O2 (which does have unlimited downloads by the way, when I re-formatted my PC I installed all Windows Updates, Cygwin and MikTeX, so had about 12Gb in one day), I had mobile broadband. That gave a cool 400 bytes/s download speed. Google would time out :(

Anyway, back to topic - I can't see exclusive digital things happening soon, it's just not reliable enough. One professional blogger was on the news yesterday saying that he had spent years blogging on MySpace before Facebook came along, and now he's going to lose most of his work that was on there. The UK government wants to phase out cheques by 2020, but they'll still find it difficult to get it done by then. eBooks are OK but rely on a power supply - when I go to Tanzania and want to read on the beach, I don't want to do it on my iPhone screen with a 1d battery life :)

I'm on BT and just outside Manchester. ~350metres from the exchange (in a straight line, so cables will be much longer as they follow the roads), and am getting ~15Mb/s (1.6MB) downloads. Upload is shitty 120KB/s. Yay Asynchronous!

Service is reliable for the most part, and swiftly fixed when not. Not the cheapest, but works for me as-is.

Might look at Optical when they manage to get that out, but TBH, for my needs, it's overkill.

Interactive media like multiplayer (online) games have difficulties with that.

And how do you prove that the game in question is yours? Okay, iris scan then. I've heard that the iris is even more unique than the fingerprint. Safe enough for me. However, if the authorization agency doesn't accept my iris for some reason, how can I re-access my property. With a physical book its simple: It's in my house - it's mine. With non-physical data it seems to be more difficult.

[rant]
Utter nonsense and rubbish.
People that say traditional distribution will die out in our lifetime are like the amish people,
they live in their own magic dream land.
Besides that, i'm sick an tired of those that say "but it's CD quality",
even though this may be true it's still a whole lot of bollocks and i tell you why:
The CD never was good quality to begin with!
Audiophiles don't spend tens or even hundreds of thousands on vinyl out of charity,
and if you never experienced it you just have no idea what you are missing.
Oh and at the other end of the range, there are still those that can not afford our digital lifestyle.

I'm not saying digital distribution is evil or bad, it adds nicely to that what we already have,
but saying this is the one and only way is ignorant.

I agree that for audiophiles music is unlikely to go digital until they can get the same quality as on vinyl (my mother still uses those, since she really likes classical music, she also spends a lot of money on loudspeakers, she could none of that on a computer).

In the same way, people who love movies are also likely to keep non-digital versions of their favourite movies, and bibliophiles like me aren't going to give up on actual books.

But you've got to recognize that people who are passionate about a particular medium are a small minority and that for the majority a transition to digital forms have no negative consequences.
When people talk about going all-digital, they're talking about mainstream media, not the people still using vinyls.

Something about having a physical object is more appealing to me. I keep all my video games and system. I don’t use them but I like having them.

Well, i remember a fellow musician saying "it feels odd to sign a burned CD".
This is a good point: What do you get signed?
Getting signed a burned CD with a printed out cover just doesn't feel right.
Having a signature on a vinyl jacket or a CD booklet is just so much better, and it will last longer.

I also like real books. Sounds really stupid, but i really like their smell,
and the feel of the pages under my fingers would be dearly missed too.

While i would agree that digital distribution is a huge factor,
i think people that go completely digital are rarer than those that have their kink for classic distribution,
even though they may be slightly more plentiful here,
but in the end, we are in the forum of a platform for digital distributing.

Afaik we will not run out of paper anytime soon. And also forcing people to go all digital with books is difficult, you can just print them and bind the printed pages to have a book. Also a book can survive centauries and you can access it without electricity and special software.

Electronic books however you can search faster (especially good for textbooks), add remarks and edit them later, maybe also switch between the normal and audio book version (if both are sold together).

However my bookshelf is almost full. Either I build myself a library or I will have to go a hybrid way. All books that I want to read again >> physical copy, all books that I want to read only once >> electronic.