Plenty has been written about how more and more things are going digital. About how the world is slowly, but surely moving on from the old paper and plastic media that used to hold it in thrall and into the newer territory of the completely electronic frontier. It’s no big surprise for most people at this point that progress is being made, but it does still present some interesting questions.
How long will it take? A lot of people, myself included, seem to want to know exactly how long it is going to take for the world to completely switch over from one form of media to the other, but the answer is not so clean cut.
First of all different businesses and industries are moving at different speeds. While my bank is moving rapidly towards the complete removal of paperwork - they currently offer paperless billing, and checks, but they have started charging for all checks and plan on completely ceasing production of them in the future as well as discontinuing paper billing statements – the book, video game, and movie industries are moving a tad slower. Still, it’s become clear that even if old media is not completely wiped out in the coming years that they will be greatly reduced.
The pattern we are seeing now is similar to what we saw with VHS and cassette tapes when DV Ds and CDs originally came onto the market.
At first many people balked at the pricing of these items, or resisted the strange change in formatting. Why by a DVD player and DVDs when your VCR worked just fine? Yet, as soon as the items became inexpensive enough for people to afford them they proliferated like mad, bringing a fairly quick end to both VHS and cassette tapes.
You can tell that the industry leaders know how this is going to go too. All three major console companies currently offer some kind of only game content, with Nintendo being the only one that does not offer full release titles for download. The latest PSP doesn’t even have a spot for physical media on it – it’s download only. Many of today’s major PC titles are available through Steam. Borders and other book sellers sell E-Book readers now as well as books, even though each unit they sell would cut into their ability to sell books to customers.
The last book I read even had an advertisement in it for the E-book version of the book. It encouraged me to put the book down and go download a copy of the E-book.
The internet is the ultimate competitive field for creative content already. Pricing is generally affordable for all, much more so than a brick and mortar store, and downloadable content cuts the price of shipping right out of the picture for anything purchased online.
With shipping out of the picture even if the price of the physical title and the printed title are the same the downloadable title is cheaper to buy and does not require much waiting time by comparison to how long it would take to download. For both software and games this can be an ideal medium of both creation and distribution which cuts down costs to the seller and developer which in turn increases their overall profits if they do not adjust the sale price accordingly.
Movies on the other hand can be a different matter altogether.
Generally a fully featured HD title that can be downloaded with all of the content that would be found on the BluRay disc you’d find in the store is huge. This leads to incredibly large download times and makes it impossible to stream at the “full HD” resolutions very well. What this means is that people are still generally willing and able to just go out and buy a title they want, to rent it from a surviving rental store, or to have a copy mailed to them from either Netflix or someone trying to copy Netflix’s model, like Blockbuster.
Personally I noticed that I am much more willing to buy a PC title off of Steam than to order a physical copy from a store, and more importantly I am more likely to download it than try to find it at the store in the first place.
I haven’t really gotten used to the idea of an electronic book yet, but I admit that it is growing on me. When it was first introduced to me I didn’t think too much about the idea of reading things online in general, but now I find myself doing it more often than not. For one thing it is much nicer to not have to figure out where to put a new book on my tiny shelf space, for another thing, it usually costs me less to buy an E-book than the physical book.
Of course, I can’t sell an E-book back, once you’ve got it that’s pretty much it. On the other hand, many downloadable titles can be re-downloaded repeatedly so you can’t permanently damage or lose them either.
When will the change be finished? Impossible to say, but as we approach the time where every person has a cellular phone and every cell phone has the ability to download and display/play books, music, games, and low grade-videos I can see it being very soon indeed.