One of my fellow PhD students has been highlighting bits in his textbooks and annotating it with notes written in the margins. The rest of us look on in horror at him writing in a textbook! Don't know why, we just consider textbooks to be beautiful works that we can keep for years to help us if we get stuck. As Trilarion says, you can search quicker in electronic books, but I still like the fact that I can go to the library, find a book on my specialist subject, and then hand it back, ready for the next person who needs it :)

The main thing about it though is the fact that if people start to grow a brain they'll realize that they're paying the same exact price.... So why not get the one with substance rather than a digital copy reliant on a company's existence?

Another thing to consider in my mind is this: Haven't any of you ever read a book or listened to a record that was your parents' or grandparents'? Imagine if everything were digital, You can't happen upon these in an old box somewhere. And if/when we get older and go senile or die it's not like we can speak from the grave to tell our kids and relatives our passwords so they can get a "hold" of them, or have them implanted into out bodies or etched onto our bones or something....

Think of that too, Digital media will not exist to be passed on. when you go your "copy" of t will fade into the ether essentially.

To me all the digital distribution stuff is just a fad like being cool with your mac, or your blackberry, facebook, or whatever. It's just making everything worse.

I never said it's a good world we're heading towards. And why all the stuff about authentication? This is only for buying something, not for keeping it or anything. I mean, even now you can theoretically share accounts on whatever platform and other people just can download your stuff. DRM is going to die out, sooner or later, just like dinosaurs.

There will be terminals in cities then, and everyone will have handheld computers. If you have no internet access or whatever, you can go to a terminal and download your date by it to your computer, completely wireless. Or maybe it goes over satellite, then everyone has internet access at any time and just needs to log in with his PC (much like mobile phones work with calling).

Talk about yourself :-P I will NEVER spend my money on some stupid "thin-PC" thingy, I already have a smartphone and I don't feel the hurry to get any more "portal" device.

Personally, I am thrilled with all of my entertainment going digital. First I got rid of all of my CD's... Then my photos, home movies and important papers... Then it took years, but now I am getting rid of all of my books, movies and games. When I buy a game on GOG, I give away my physical copy. Same for my books. I used to enjoy collecting these things, but now that I have a family, a room full of games, movies and books is just not practical. I actually think it is awesome that when I die my kids will not have a house full of shit to go through... They will just be like "did you grab a copy of Dad's photos and home movies" (which they will already have stored at their homes as a backup anyway)... They will say "yep" then wipe my computer and kindle and give it to their children... :-p This may sound sad to some people, but life is about experiences, not crap, and I for one am happy to unload all of my junk and make some space in my life. I can't be the only one.... Anyone else find this an exciting time?

Edit: I am not saying the physical distribution will go away. I am just saying that I enjoy the clutter free lifestyle. I do, however, think that local stores will go away due to lack of demand for physical media and you will have to go online to order physical copies. It is already hard to find PC games in local stores as it is. I also agree that Vinyl sounds better than an MP3, but only a small percentage of the population is going to care about that... I am not one of them... I will take my inferior MP3 any day. :-) Some of my friends collect vinyl, however.... They have big music days in my city once a month where you can pick up lots of Vinyl, but if you live out in the country, you would have to order online, at least where I live.

Edit Edit: Have not found a solution for toddler books yet, so we have a TON of children’s books... Indestructible Kindles??? lol...

I do.
Sure - there are collectors, but ultimately games are supposed to be played, not put on pedestals.
As I gaze at my national library, I can't help but wonder how long it will take until they'll need even more space to store all those books and magazines they have to keep copies of... Sooner or later they'll run out of physical space and the materials will deteriorate further and further...
Sooner or later there has to be a switch, or else we'll drown in physical media.

Sooner or later your hard disk(s) will fry, and you will badly regret all the nonsense about the "digital future" we are dooming ourselves to.

I don't foresee this happening. The industry is pushing it because it wants money per access and more control. Sure its a convenience on the subway to pull out a tablet and have everything you own... but its also a convenience to be at home and have everything you own while the PC is being repaired, or the power goes out, or you cancel internet to pay the bills.

I stare at a monitor all day at work, I don't want to load up my books on the monitor at home.

I like GoG because I won't buy games with DRM, and some of the games aren't available anywhere else. Other than that I will choose the disk based version. But I still get to back up to disk, so Its really only a simulated digital distribution at that point.

MS and Google both have plans to get you booted up to the internet. If some had their way PCs would come with coin slots. A digital future is inevitable. A solely digital future will be a nightmare realized too late. I would expect if we go as far as some hope that we will also go full circle some time thereafter.

As for general thoughts on digital distribution, GoG is a perfect fit for me. I get to play content I would have otherwise passed on due to DRM issues. The devs get their money from me because I was able to buy it in an acceptable way and I didn't have to pass on their content, and I get to make my own discs or backups and play locally how I like so I don't have to worry about the future of my investments. I'm hopeful the future is this bright, else I'll have to choose a new hobby ;) (needlepoint isn't digital yet)

You're shooting yourself in the foot and give me the satisfaction of pointing it out. For that I thank you.

If you buy the game on a DVD, guess what ? It is gonna deteriorate. What's the best you can do ? Back it up. Which brings us to "sooner or later your hard disks will fry" - there's no escaping it, is there ? The best you can do is, like me, to keep multiple backups and periodically compare their checksums. As one fails (preferably - beforehand and as soon as first errors appear), make another.

But this has nothing to do with the "digital future", does it ? You usually get to keep your stuff in the cloud, able to redownload it whenever you want. Personal backups are for paranoid folk like me.

Ok, here is a counter argument.

Photo albums at my parents house... House burns down or the toilette floods or whatever, now all/some of the photos are gone.

Instead, now I have them all digitized. They are at my house (with a 2nd backup), their house (with a 2nd backup), and at my sisters house. We can all view them whenever we want, and have them as our rolling screensaver etc. where before we hardly ever looked at them. They are also now MORE protected IMO through appropriate backups instead of less.

Same goes for my music/movies/games. Physical media... You should back those up same as your digital files.

Same for my books...... DOH!!! The person above me flooded their bathroom and now my one bookshelf is ruined... Vs. DOH... My kindle just died... let me re-sync my new one. (Granted that in this case I am relying on a service not my own backups)

I guess what I am saying is that I do not think hard drive failure is valid argument unless you are not going to back up your data, in which case I would certainly not recommend living a digital lifestyle... lol...

For me the difference is the total lack of one or the other. The OP said CDs won't be around much longer. From there I took the discussion to mean 100% digital. That is where I have a problem. I think the middle ground is the safest and happiest place. You get to use your preferred at your leisure and the other is there when catastrophe strikes. The drive to digital only which often includes DRM in the model is to get everyone to a place where there is a single throat to choke. All the eggs go in one basket. And when that basket fries, we go postal. (hopefully theoretically).

So my position is one of consumer freedom. There is reason to keep both the physical and digital mediums alive, but very few reasons (or kosher ones for that matter) to completely remove either.

Depends on your perspective. There's certainly reason from a consumer perspective. But not at all from a distributor/publisher perspective.

If there is consumer reason, there is, by default, distributor reason. Its why all the fast food restaurants copy each other. Sure it costs more to add a menu item, but you don't want customers going to the competitor because they are the only ones that carry a fish sandwich.

Yeah. Over a 100 years time span, given you store it in appropriate conditions. HDDs? Burned media? Their lifetime is way fainter than commercially-pressed media. So my argument is as valid as it gets.