Digital vs physical media which do you prefer?

[payn]

I'd talk to amazon about that.

There is generally a warning about things that disappear these days.

If you had THAT much disappear recently, I'd imagine it may have been when they switched formats (for their old format to using more of the ebook format now, which I actually appreciate because I can buy books online from other stores and then download them to my Kindle as I wish much more easily. Project Gutenberg books are easy to put onto the kindle).

In regards to the topic question, I suppose it depends. For games, I only buy games that have offline installers (which means, I don't use STEAM and it's default DRM, which is steam...some have even MORE DRM than that). I store them on a backup hard drive. Does that mean I have physical media or digital media?

For books I use a Kindle these days. I still have a huge library with physical books, but most of my reading is via Kindle these days. It's just easier to carry around with a bunch of books on it. They are all stored on the Kindle though, so is that physical or digital media?

All my music is off of Itunes these days. They are downloaded to various apple items though, and those things are physical. Is that physical or digital?

I can't read RPG books off a computer though. I need to be able to flip through them as I wont. RPG books that I actually USE, those are all physical media.

I also refuse to play those boardgames which require you to use a tablet or phone to play. My boardgames are ALL physical media.

Movies are MOSTLY physical media still. I have at times rented or bought a movie because I didn't want to take the trouble to try to hunt down a physical copy (normally it's a movie I haven't seen before and so I'm not sure I WANT to have a physical copy, if I REALLY like it, I can always try to hunt down a physical copy later) and thus would have it digitally (if bought that's a digital copy I own supposedly).

Thats probably more the pickle folks here have is subscription vs individual purchase. If you pay for it, download it to your device, thats akin to physical media in terms of ownership. If you pay a sub for access, need internet, and lose access when sub is cancelled, thats likely what is meant by digital here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thats probably more the pickle folks here have is subscription vs individual purchase. If you pay for it, download it to your device, thats akin to physical media in terms of ownership. If you pay a sub for access, need internet, and lose access when sub is cancelled, thats likely what is meant by digital here.

Kindle is a weird case. In theory you "own" Kindle books--except the licensing with Amazon from the source can change that, and they have a clause that tells you that's the case in your purchase agreement. And Kindle books are not as easy to backup or reformat as they could be.

 

[payn]

Kindle is a weird case. In theory you "own" Kindle books--except the licensing with Amazon from the source can change that, and they have a clause that tells you that's the case in your purchase agreement. And Kindle books are not as easy to backup or reformat as they could be.

I suppose that there are going to be middling cases. I dont know how the kindle works. If they lose the license does it delete the book from your device? Could you DL all your books and then not connect the kindle to the net and keep them forever? If you need net, and it can be deleted, Id lump that in subscription over purchase.

 

[Queer Venger]

Mix.
For the most part (and particularly with my gaming books/boardgames/cards) I will always prefer physical. I want to own the product, not lease it. Even though my group and I all use Beyond (its convenient and speeds up play significantly) I still reference my books during games.

However, with novels, fiction books Im starting to do digital (kindle) because I just have no space left in my house (and my garage) to store them. I believe that Kindle also lets you download your books via pdf unless that's been changed.

 

[schneeland]

Thats probably more the pickle folks here have is subscription vs individual purchase. If you pay for it, download it to your device, thats akin to physical media in terms of ownership. If you pay a sub for access, need internet, and lose access when sub is cancelled, thats likely what is meant by digital here.

I tend to say, there's more than two buckets (at least for me):

1. Physical item, purchase (after I buy it, I own the thing and can do with it what I want)
   -> Fair model. Pretty established.
2. Physical item, subscription (for media products: mostly libraries)
   -> Also fair, especially when library access is cheap
3. Digital item, purchase, ownership (e.g. PDF or ePUB without DRM, MP3 or FLAC files, ...)
   -> Probably fine, unless obscure software or devices are required for consumption
4. Digital item, purchase, license (e.g. PDF or ePUB with DRM, content published and consumable only on a web portal, most video games on Steam etc.)
   -> This is probably the main thing that annoys people (incl. myself) - you pay as if you had ownership, but in practice, your ownership is pretty restricted and content might be pulled at any time
5. Digital item, subscription (e.g. Spotify, Netflix, ...)
   -> Assuming somewhat reasonable pricing, I tend to say this is fine for most people, since there's no pretense of ownership

And if I look at those, #3 is my preference for RPG products, but I'm really fine with anything except #4.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I suppose that there are going to be middling cases. I dont know how the kindle works. If they lose the license does it delete the book from your device? Could you DL all your books and then not connect the kindle to the net and keep them forever? If you need net, and it can be deleted, Id lump that in subscription over purchase.

You could make an argument its an indefinite lease rather than a purchase.

 

[grimmgoose]

I like buying physical books of the games I own and really like to run, mainly for the sake of placing the physical book on the table when we play a session.

That book is almost never picked up. Instead, I - and the rest of the players - almost exclusively use the digital PDFs (both during the session and for prep).

 

[Clint_L]

My spouse and I have found, over many decades, that it seldom pays for us to hold on to things other than for sentimental value. Stuff just winds up collecting dust and taking up space, and for what? So my kid has to deal with it after we die?

Books used to be a big hassle; we would have boxes and boxes of them. After swapping to a kindle we chucked almost all of them, except a few I keep in my class for lending out to kids (who can keep them if they want; IDC) and some antique books similarly in my class. We have a few art books and I have a few D&D books that I like to peruse on occasion, but we liberated so much space and removed so much clutter. Ditto for CDs - after going to subscription I held onto my collection of over a thousand CDs for a few years before accepting that I would never listen to them again, and donated the lot of them to a local Boys and Girls Club drop-off. Again, liberating, and I now have access to FAR more music. DVDs, same story.

For us, letting go of the need to possess physical things just to get at the media content has been a huge quality of life improvement. It also saves us a fortune.

 

[JEB]

A mix, that's changed with time.

Books: Used to prefer physical, and avoided PDFs/ebooks. But once I got a Microsoft Surface, and reading them became much more pleasant, my attitude shifted. At this point I still prefer physical books for pleasure reading, but stuff I only need for reference purposes (such as many crunch-heavy RPG books) I tend to only have in PDF/ebook. However, I expect to be able to download them to store; if access is dependent on a subscription or app, I'm not interested.

Film and TV: For a while, I happily relied on streaming services, only purchasing DVDs or Blu-Rays for my absolute favorites or when no other option was available. But now that the streaming environment has become so fragmented, and it's no longer cost-effective to buy a dozen different services for one or two shows each, I have a renewed interest in owning shows on physical media. (Mind, I do still have a few streaming services, such as Netflix and Disney+. I just wind up missing out on the shows on other services.) I'd consider digital purchases as well, if I could actually download them and keep them offline (as opposed to being bound to some service or device).

Music: I buy and download my music digitally through Bandcamp (preferred choice) or Amazon (as a fallback). I only rarely buy physical media for music anymore, basically when I really really like the band/album. I don't pay for music streaming services and don't trust iTunes, though I do listen to a lot of music on YouTube (because convenient).

Video Games: I almost exclusively play games on PC through Steam, though I do have concerns about what will happen if they ever went draconian with their DRM. I also buy stuff from GOG, which I feel a lot better doing (no DRM), but Steam is where my friends are. The only physical games I have are titles on my old consoles (my newest is a first-gen Xbox One), but even there I'm more likely to play a PC port when available. I used to pay for Xbox Live's Gold service for the free monthly games, though since they've stopped, I plan to drop it when the next renewal cycle comes around. (A friend tried to persuade me to sign up for their subscription service, but it doesn't seem cost-effective.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I own almost no purely digital media beyond some legal forms, my photos and self-created gaming stuff- characters, campaign info, etc. And of course, anything internal to an app.

All my other gaming stuff and nearly 100% of my music & movies are on physical formats. Pretty much everything I own is a THING, and it can’t be taken from me by some corporate decision.

Part of my preference is because I HAVE lost access to things due to the inevitable march of changing technology. Some poetry of mine, written in the 1980s, was printed out when I upgraded my computer. But the printouts got destroyed.

A chord book for an alternative guitar tuning was written on a Palm Tungsten. I got it removed and placed on a CD-ROM. I can’t find the CD, and the Palm is past doing another data recovery.

My spreadsheets and written documents for the best campaign I ever ran are inaccessible because Microsoft stopped supporting the programs they were created in, which cannot be run on any computer I own. There was no translation program available for importing them into the replacement programs, either.