Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
This.
...
Life is too short to spend in transit.
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While you are completely correct, I sometimes feel that there is "life lost" by moving everything to digital and by doing all the shopping online. Yes, it saves a lot of space, time and money, and is more convenient, but still....
1997 (just before I got internet):
- I phoned some stores to find out if one of them had a particular book in stock.
- I went to a store, and bought a book in Dutch at a price of fl. 16.95 (~€7.50) Buying the English book in question was almost impossible as it was prohibitively expensive to import one (1) book from the UK. At that time, English versions of books were not really sold in the Netherlands if there was a Dutch translation available.
- I came home with the item, and read it.
- I archived it into the collection.
- Now I had acquired a
book.
2002 (I had internet for some years and started online shopping)
- I went to a site, and bought one (1) book in English at a price of €7.50 (And €1.95 shipment.)
- I waited 7 days for the book to arrive. Acceptable, as it was the original English version. Had I ordered it at a bookstore, it would take 2-3 weeks and would be more expensive than the Dutch version. Sometimes, I'd buy a series of 3, if it was one story anyway, to save on shipping.
- I read the book, and archived it into my collection.
- Now I had acquired a
book.
Since 2012 (when I got into e-reading again):
- I stay home, and buy 50 books in English at a price of €0.75.
- Within 5 minutes I download all of them onto my computer.
- I sort them, fix the metadata and layout where necessary and stash them into Calibre.
- Someday, I'll read them, but I don't know when.
- I have now acquired... uh... 50
files.
- That would not have been fully mine had I not stripped the DRM off of them.
Now I can get MUCH more books (files), MUCH cheaper, and MUCH faster, but still I have a feeling that a bit of the experience of acquiring a book and reading is being lost. Would I go back to 1997? Probably not, as the advantages of the new way of doing things outweigh the disadvantages. However, I can still be of the opinion that the complete experience we have now may not be better than the one back then.