I went away from physical products largely for space reasons (though outside the stupidly expensive cost of Kindle books, cost was also a factor).
Same. Living in the UK, in London specifically, I just don't have room for the libraries of books I go through. I have literally hundreds of books in my Kindle and Audible lists (and a number from other places, like Google Books). If those were physical, esp. as many of them are chunky tomes, that'd be several extra shelves worth, and I was already over realistic capacity.
Replacing electronic equipment is expensive. Thus the poor and upcoming are likelier to lose their information. Society as a whole suffers from this loss of the reliability to archive.
I get the concern here, and true poverty absolutely does mean you are likely to lose information you're trying to retain (though this also applies to physical formats, for the most part, and it hurts my heart thinking about it). I mean hell, I'm not even nearly poor, but I can't afford to maintain physical information because I don't have the space for it. I think this is something North Americans particularly tend to overlook, because houses are simply far larger relative to their cost (especially relative to earnings). That's changing fast as the house markets of the US and Canada are being depleted and controlled by various forces, but people over about 45 who have worked that whole time likely have a decent-sized property (if they live outside the densest coastal cities, anyway). It's much easier to decide "physical is the best!" when you genuinely have enough room.
Re: upcoming as most of those people are younger I suspect most data loss is due to not attempting preservation. That's not a judgement or criticism, it's just how it is. When you're young, you don't realize how easily information disappears. The number of posts and articles and so on I would have saved from the 1990s and '00s internet particularly is wild. Hell, a forum I used to go to got shut down in 2020 or so with basically no notice, and there was a review thread which I have literally have paid money to retain, in part because I'd written so many reviews on it, some of them even containing some shred of intelligence lol.
* - barring calamaties like fire or flood, which hammer physical and digital media equally.
That's not quite true. Calamities hammer physical digital media, but they don't usually hammer digital media stored online. This is part of why I'm increasingly moving media online. There are other threats there, of course, which don't apply to physical media. But it's not an identical situation.
This is one of my really big complaints with so-called technological advances: the end consumer is far too often expected to either buy the same media again or pay to have it transferred, every time a technology is declared obsolete.
Part of the problem here is that technology isn't declared obsolete in some neat and agreed way, because if that did happen, we'd see clear upgrade paths and good information on how to move on, and indeed, moving on would be much cheaper because everyone would be doing it.
Instead technology slowly becomes
seen as obsolete, even as some people keep using it. And thus we don't get a neat and clean "Okay now use this to replace that, here's the method for transferring it", we get something spotty and unreliable.
I'd like to see a book pull off that trick!
