Physical Media

[jcb]

Recently, XBox and Playstation proclaimed that within a couple years, they will no longer produce discs with games on them. Many gamers were/are outraged at this decision. It made me think about the physical media that I own. I realized that I treat media differently depending on its type.

So:
- Books: 99% physical. I sometimes even like to print off PDF files to read them if they're long. Reading a book on a computer screen is not fun.
- Music: 100% digital. I've never liked CDs or DVDs. I've always found them easy to destroy, and difficult to edit. A flash drive full of songs is superior.
- Movies/Shows: 100% digital.
- Games: Old stuff is physical, new stuff is digital. The newest console I own is a PlayStation 1, but I mostly play PC games on Steam nowdays anyways.

So, how much and what kind of physical media do you own?

[Man in Space]

So, how much and what kind of physical media do you own?

• Over 90% physical (though even that figure may be too low). I do have a few that are only as eBooks due to convenience; I also have numerous resources that I was able to find with Google Scholar, the Internet Archive, and/or institutional JSTOR access from my undergrad days, though I also have a nontrivial amount of print versions of similar resources, mainly dealing with historical phonology and language evolution (I have a dedicated section of my bookshelf for such works).
• Music: A while ago, it would've been skewed maybe eighty to ninety percent digital? Once Spotify became available I was able to keep up in many ways with streaming, though I did buy some physical copies of albums/bands that are, or at least were, not or no longer on Spotify, and I have an interest in music that may never have been big enough (or timed correctly) for being on mainstream platforms, and I've always had an appreciation for vinyl. Of late I have also been feeling a return to the humble K7. Some of this is likely driven by the recent trends of deleting or removing access to content you've already purchased, and a hard copy is something not as easily seized or destroyed. I will further add that, in my own music-making and music-preservationist endeavors, I greatly like physical releases (holding a vinyl record with my performance on it is a very powerful feeling and I love it when I can get others that feeling; it also feels more "official" and allows me to geek out on the design and typography things.
• Games: I like that you brought this up.
  1. Video games: A mix, nowadays. Lots of virtual purchases on Steam and the PSN, but I prefer having the disc available¹.
  2. Board games: Largely physical, as you could imagine. I'm surprised I have so many of them.
  3. D&D&al.: I am a sometime TTRPG DM. My D&D edition of choice is 2e. Physical copies of 2e materials² are often costly and/or difficult to come by. DriveThruRPG, much to my surprise, has PDF versions of basically everything TSR released. The PDFs are sometimes searchable, sometimes not, and--contrary to what you might think obvious--they can be tedious to reference on demand when needed, especially if they aren't searchable. I greatly prefer having a hard copy in front of me, no matter which side of the screen I'm on or what system we're playing.
• Movies: Again, streaming has affected this, though I do possess a modest collection of DVDs and BluRays. I am also interested in media preservation as regards to films: I purchased the BluRay of Megalopolis for several reasons, of which one was explicitly to be able to prevent it from fading from accessibility like it's the Son of Disney Vault.

----

1. You can imagine my reaction to Sony's recent announcement.
2. The PHB and DMG, however, are reasonably common and I've seen them in multiple game stores of various sizes.

[zompist]

Books: omigod, I have so many. Never got into e-books, except for those I needed for research.
Music: also digital, though these days I rely heavily on Youtube. Vinyl & CDs didn't survive the last move.
Movies: I have a tiny tiny collection, though they're almost all movies I or my wife loves.
Games: same as you, but again, got rid of a bunch of discs... I don't even have a CD drive on my gaming computer.

[Man in Space]

I don't even have a CD drive on my gaming computer.

My desktop machine is my best friend's old gaming rig, and it, too, lacks an optical drive. My mother got me one for Christmas a few years back because she knew that I had physical, on-disc media.

[jcb]

Books: omigod, I have so many. Never got into e-books, except for those I needed for research.
Music: also digital, though these days I rely heavily on Youtube. Vinyl & CDs didn't survive the last move.
Movies: I have a tiny tiny collection, though they're almost all movies I or my wife loves.
Games: same as you, but again, got rid of a bunch of discs... I don't even have a CD drive on my gaming computer.

(1) I agree, a digital copy of a book is better for searching. A physical copy is better for portability.
(2) I too get most of my music from YouTube. Thankfully I've never had to move around boxes full of vinyls and CDs.
(3) I don't even have a DVD player to play a movie on a DVD even if I had one!
(4) I haven't had a CD/DVD drive on my computer in at least 10 years.

[jcb]

Video games: A mix, nowadays. Lots of virtual purchases on Steam and the PSN, but I prefer having the disc available1.
[...]
1. You can imagine my reaction to Sony's recent announcement.

I'm very interested in how XBox and PlayStation fare in a post-CD/DVD world. They're more directly competing with Steam now, but Steam has had a 23-year head start on building loyalty to their digital marketplace. Also, Valve's different ownership structure has bred trust and stability in a way that I doubt that Microsoft and Sony can do; I fear that they'll be too tempted to pull shenanigans like charging monthly fees, constantly removing games from people's libraries, or shutting down one console's store just to start anew with the next. (Nintendo is also notorious for doing this.)

I wonder if the concept of a "gaming console" is dying as a whole; After all, the concept of a handheld gaming console has simply merged with that of a smartphone. (The last handheld consoles, the Nintendo 3DS and Sony Vita, both released in 2011, 15 years ago.) Also, consoles used to have drastically different hardware from each other and desktop computers, but nowdays they all run x86-64 processors.

[xxx]

I think I only really own physical media...
as for the digital media I downloaded, I lose it all...
I downloaded many ePubs—largely because of presbyopia—but I have nothing left of them now...
I had a huge collection of MIDI music, but lost it in a hard drive crash...
as for games, I never rebuilt the board game collection I lost during a move,
and I stopped buying video games after the Atari VCS, and stopped playing my son's games after the PlayStation 1...
in short, I mainly have paper books; the rest depends on the internet and on sites that appear and disappear or change their algorithm...

[Man in Space]

The last handheld consoles, the Nintendo 3DS and Sony Vita, both released in 2011, 15 years ago.

The Switch isn't handheld?

[jcb]

The last handheld consoles, the Nintendo 3DS and Sony Vita, both released in 2011, 15 years ago.

The Switch isn't handheld?

I think it feels more like a console (like the GameCube) than a handheld (like the GameBoy Advance).

Also, 99% of the time when I've played a Switch at a friend's house, it's hooked up to a TV and we're playing it like a console.

[Ketsuban]

I prefer physical books, but not dogmatically. GURPS has almost entirely gone digital, for example, so I have physical copies of the Basic Set and GURPS Powers but a larger library of PDFs. I also have a copy of GURPS Mecha which I picked up on a whim - the third edition GURPS library is much less digitised.

I'm not really a music person, and digital is easier.

For games I go physical when a physical copy actually gets you the game itself and isn't just an object attached to a code for an online service. In practice that means cartridge copies of games on Switch (thankfully the absurdity of "game key cards" only applies to third-party developers) but all digital on PC; I already have a sizeable Steam library, so using it to acquire more games just makes sense.

[Raphael]

Oh, interesting thread!

Books: Mostly digital, but I still have a lot of paper books from back before I went into digital, and I still sometimes buy the paper version of a book if I see it as, sort of, important.

Music: Entirely digital. Then again, technologically, CDs are digital, too . I own a collection of individual legal mp3s I bought from Amazon before I took up my current "try to avoid Amazon" approach. Since I got into that approach, I got back to sometimes buying physical CDs. However, I don't listen to the CDs. I rip them to mp3s and then listen to the mp3s.

To illustrate, here's a quote from and earlier post of mine:

Different topic: I have a both weird and specific request for music recommendations. It requires a lengthy introduction before I can get to the point.

I don't use music streaming services because I'm generally no fan of streaming if I can avoid it. I prefer to have things as files on my computer, where I have some amount of control over them and can still use them when there's a temporary problem with my Internet connection. Even when I want to watch a video on Youtube, what I usually do is to use one of those software tools Google really doesn't want you to use to download the video and then watch the file on my computer.

Yes, I know, I just arrived from the year 2026 BC.

Movies/shows: Generally physical, at least the parts that my lawyer, if I would have one, would allow me to talk about. These days, I usually try to rip individual DVDs when I want to re-watch them, but I'm not interested in ripping all my old DVDs.

Another old quote to illustrate:

It's now been about ten years since I bought the first handful of DVDs that eventually grew into a fairly large de facto DVD collection. I say "de facto" because I never set out to collect DVDs, the way people set out to collect sports cards or action figures. I just thought it would be nice to own some movies (and later TV shows) on a physical medium that my computer can play, and, well, one thing led to another. And now I own a lot of instances of a medium everyone else sees as obsolete.

Games: Like jcb, basically - old stuff is physical, new stuff is digital. Though I haven't played anything from a physical format in ages, while I have sometimes played stuff from files I bought from gog more recently.

I have two bookcases in my room. One of them is entirely filled with physical media - mainly DVDs and paper books - while the other one has only one shelf and a few parts of other shelves filled with them.

[bradrn]

Back home in Australia I had a lot of physical books and strongly preferred them over ebooks. I have a Kindle but rarely used it outside travel; I always found that reading books electronically severely impacted my reading comprehension compared to physical books.

Weirdly, this seems to have flipped in the past couple of years (since I first lived alone, when I moved to France). I now almost exclusively read on my Kindle, and own only one or two physical books. I now find it much more comfortable to read than physical books. There’s also a question of practicality since I now live in a much smaller apartment away from home.

(I do not own any music, movies or games.)

[malloc]

Plenty of books and several DVDs but not much else. Given how quickly formats have changed over the past few decades, I never really got into the habit of collecting physical media. Nonetheless with paywalls and enshittification running rampant, I probably should rethink that. Granted, you can't go wrong with books. They don't need electricity or specialized equipment to use and they don't get outmoded by another format every decade.

[WeepingElf]

All stuff mostly physical.

[alice]

All stuff mostly physical for me too. My entire music collection is contained on lovingly curated vinyl and played on top-end equipment with the latest sound-cancelling technology. There's nothing which can match the ritual of taking a record carefully out of its sleeve, examining it carefully for dust and scratches, putting it carefully onto the player, and carefully lowering the needle. Something las been lost since the arrival of the CD, and we respect our music less because of it.

[jcb]

All stuff mostly physical for me too. My entire music collection is contained on lovingly curated vinyl and played on top-end equipment with the latest sound-cancelling technology. There's nothing which can match the ritual of taking a record carefully out of its sleeve, examining it carefully for dust and scratches, putting it carefully onto the player, and carefully lowering the needle. Something las been lost since the arrival of the CD, and we respect our music less because of it.

Do you mean that you listen to your vinyl records with headphones? I didn't know that such a thing was possible!

[lëtzeshark]

I prefer physical books and video game cartridges (I have a Nintendo Switch; makes it easier to share with friends and family), and 90% of my video games are physical copies, but most of my music is anymore digital (iTunes/whatever it's now called) thanks to a lack of CD players on my computers since... well, 2015. I do have a healthy digital library of papers and journal articles for writing publications/manuscripts, though. Honestly, I don't have much in the way of movies: the ones I had were physical DVDs, but those were left in the US when I ran away.

[zompist]

It occurred to me that I have some actual data on physical books vs. e-books, namely my own sales. I'd assume the figures are typical for conlang nerds.

Overall:
36,000 print, 20,600 e-books. That's 63% physical.

For fiction: 492 print, 442 e-books.

[bradrn]

It occurred to me that I have some actual data on physical books vs. e-books, namely my own sales. I'd assume the figures are typical for conlang nerds.

Overall:
36,000 print, 20,600 e-books. That's 63% physical.

For fiction: 492 print, 442 e-books.

At first I thought you meant you had thirty-six thousand print books in your house…

[zompist]

At first I thought you meant you had thirty-six thousand print books in your house…

After two moves last year, it felt almost like that. In fact I have about a thousand print books, and that's after some culling.