Some of you may remember having LP records…The prospect of having to replace all of them with the CD (the coming thing) was a painful, but seemingly necessary duty to accomplish… The move from CD’s to MP3 files was only to invest some time and a small bit of labor (to do a lot of ripping and editing of related data). So too, with DVD’s…ripping them onto your harddrive took time, but increased the utility of your movie collection.
Books are the topic du jour… If you are a serious reader (i.e. someone who has a library of books…lots of books), do you consider replacing any or all of them with their eBook equivalents?
In any case, this library ‘relocation’ may be one of the larger forms of media shifting any of us will do…but there are other, emergent forms coming into view. The following quote showcases some of the ways all of us already move content form one format or device to another.
There are even some tools available to help in this translocation of information, such as Instapaper, EverNote, DropBox, and Read it Later…even RSS readers traffic in this idea.
Content shifting
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/content-shifting.html
- I found this amazing artist yesterday on Soundcloud named James Vincent McMorrow. Here’s his new record called Early in the Morning. I’m listening right now on my laptop, but I really want to listen on our Sonos system.
- I saw that the Black Keys played SNL last night. I found the video on YouTube and sent it to Boxee so I can watch on the big screen.
- I heard some great music on Sirius XMU in the car yesterday afternoon. I want an easy way to get it from there onto fredwilson.fm.
- I saw the DOJ court order to Twitter regarding Wikileaks yesterday onTechCrunch/Scribd. I want to get the document on my iPad so I can read it on the couch in the family room.
Could you get rid of all your books?
http://www.theantiroom.com/2011/06/13/could-you-get-rid-of-all-your-books
Last weekend, one of my best friends visited from San Francisco; the first time we’d met up in four years. It was every bit as brilliant as you’d imagine. We’re as alike as it’s possible for two culturally different people to be, so meeting up with her is like meeting up with an American version of myself (admittedly, since she’s smart, hilarious, and beautiful and lives in an incredible city, this is probably just wishful thinking on my part).
Within the first five minutes, we were talking about books – typical for us. K, as befits someone living in California, is a huge iPad devotee. She reads, she told me, exclusively on the iPad now; and her toddler daughter is so used to books being interactive that she prods ‘real’ books to make the pages light up or flaps open.
‘When we’re back in the US’, K informed me, ‘I’m throwing a party to give away all my books. I have no need for them any more’.
We were driving at the time, and I nearly swerved off the road. ‘You’re GIVING AWAY your books?’ This is a woman who reads a lot, whose emotional attachment to words on a page is pretty much the same as mine. But here we were, utterly diverging. I was in the middle of knocking a house around to accommodate my reading matter, and she was streamlining hers, keeping it all archived electronically and having no need for the physical item any more. It was a real food-for-thought moment. If a passing acquaintance had told me the same, I’d have dismissed it; but when your emotional twin proposes something, it really slows down the thought process.
