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Originally Posted by stumped
I did use words like "almost", and will follow
The smart streaming providers bundle in just enough offline access to have it both ways
So my music comes from Spotify but I have enough offline playlists on hard drive to see me through an internet outage. Or I can have up to 1000 songs on a smartphone for offline use on journeys
Same with netflix, I like to have a few hours downloaded to tablet, just in case we lose internet , or electricity' or both.
If a reader app was well written ,I should have no idea if it's streaming or reading from a local drive. All that matters is that the words appear as needed, and I can search or skip when I choose to.
The benefit, or curse if you see it that way, of online reading is that you can look up words or facts, jump into X ray type analysis.... With moon reader on a tablet I can highlight something and get directly to wikipedia
Stuff that worked on paper but not so well in ebooks, like those old multiple choice adventures where you made a choice and were given your next page number, would work well if streamed.
And being able to jump in and out of high quality maps would enhance many lengthy sagas
Don't get me wrong, I like an offline, non interactive experience,. But I realise that is becoming a luddite , minority attitude
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Unfortunately, I think you are right that a majority prefer to stream. On the other hand, one can still buy music, movies and TV Shows. Heck, they still make music CD's, and DVD's for movies and TV shows. I think there is room for all of the above in the future. Most providers are looking to maximize their profits, so I suspect most content will continue to be available via multiple methods at least for my life time.
Library checkouts has the disadvantage that publishers are looking to maximize how much money they get, not maximize the number of freebies they provide to libraries and their patrons, so we are more likely to see check outs optimized for control rather than customer convenience, IMPO.