I know what you mean, and I already missed that but...

For me in the last two years, it's not so much the glee I experience anymore. Where I live (downtown in a city, well over a million people) we've reached the point where many bookstores, video stores, music stores are no longer viable. I love to spend hours in bookstores, and I had my little routine of visiting my two favourite video stores every week.

All this has already become frustrating more than anything. The more intimate personalized bookstores I liked have almost all closed down. My favourite shop of a big chain has been forced to reduce by 20% the floor space devoted to books, and my neighbour who works there told me the chain's plans is to reduce the percentage to 20% of the floor space overall, within three years. Already their sales of digital books are fairly high. The store will become in part a digital bookstore showcase (come in for a physical book, go out with the ebook instead), a kind of high end last minute gift shop, a download hub/technical service place, a place for conferences, book signings (how do you get a digital copy signed, eh. eh) and so on - in short a kind of Amazon with storefronts. Most of their sales of books/cd they already make via their website, and expect this to increase even more. Is this meant to last, or is it a transitional thing before they close their street shops altogether? Time will tell. In any case, it sounds like they may have been just enough proactive and inventive in their response to Amazon to escape the fates of B&M and others (like many Canadians retailers, they're also facing the major problem that the dollar was at .65US$ for a long time, and now has been at parity for two years. Customers expect US pricing now and we aren't getting any of that - US publishers/distributors have decided to keep the prices the same and cash the difference. They claimed it would take a few months before the prices went down, but two years later nothing has changed, and no complaint to the US government have fallen on deaf ears.).

So as much I will miss bookshopping, it's already gone or will be in a fairly close future. That's just how it is.

It's the same for DVD/BR. In the last two years, I've lost my two favourite stores that had been around forever. Even the big chains are less and less reliable and store less and less titles. If I want something in a store for sure that's not been released in the last month or isn't a big hit, I have to special order. As they too do most of their sales from their website and it's just in their stores they don't keep many titles anymore, it's no longer a matter of weeks but usually 24 hours, but it's still annoying to have to go back. This is accelerating. In the last six months, I've had more failures at finding in stores what I wanted than ever before. It seems to get worse and worse each month. For music it's going even faster (started sooner too). Given my tastes, I've pretty much relied on mailorder for a lot of stuff for over 25 years, but now it's even the more mainstream stuff I have to download as it's getting hard to find. Even the big HMV downtown has now more space devoted to high-tech gizmos, accessories for high-tech gizmos and videogames than they have CD. Two years ago they replaced about 20% of the remaining space for music by expanding the DVD/BR section, but last week I've noticed they've now started reducing their inventory for that.

So unless there's a massive nostalgia movement for retail shopping in person coming soon, it looks to me that the choice is pretty much between "enjoy it for a little more before it goes away" and "Give up and get used to the new ways".

Part of my problem is due to the fact I hate Amazon as a corporation on general principle (much like I hate Wall-Mart, Target and all the big American chains), so I avoid giving them any of my money when I can. I don't like to receive parcels all the time either, the P.O. is a long way from my place, so digital files are much, much more practical for me (and there's the thing that after collecting music, books and movies for decades, I'd love to reduce the clutter they cause)



The device no longer matter much, that's the beauty of it.



Much like people lost many CD back in the late 80s because they did all kind of stupid things to them, thinking them indestructible, before they learned the limits of the marketing ploy...

It's about time people get to learn to properly use the new devices/ways and start adopting the methods used by the pros for many years now. There's no excuse anymore. The devices are available for those who want plug-and-play automated back ups. Portable drives are virtually given away nowadays. Professionally, I have my Time Machine for short term, a kind of archival backup I update after each project, and a third HD I keep out of home, just to be even safer. I have a drive strictly for transportation, 90% of the problems occur during such. I've lost several HD over the years, but rarely lost any data but the last hour's before a crash... It should not be all that long before the kind of redundant storage systems I use at work become accessible to the home market. The big post facilities don't do back ups anymore, just archives. Because the data is always stored on several mirror locations all at once, the odds of data loss are really, really slim. Systems like this adapted for home are bound to show up sooner or later, if they haven't already.

Beside, this problem for digital files isn't as great as that. Already in case of crashes, you can often download them for free again from the provider, and this service is bound to become universal before long. E.g: when my ipad crashed, the albums I had bought from i-tunes reappeared in my download cue. Apple's Cloud is also taking care of this.

It's all a matter of getting organized and learning to use the new stuff properly, just like you don't brush a DVD to remove a stain, or you don't store books in damp places or read them in the bath.

The switch to digital media isn't far ahead, and won't be as challenging as some think. If my 65 y.o. technophobe mom can learn to use a digital recorder and know how to transfer on another device shows she wishes to keep longer, anyone can.

Sooner than later, people who insist on getting physical copies are likely to be penalized (we already should be, if you ask me). We're in the phase of internationalization of retail where tons of people are now massively receiving parcels all over the planet, and very often for products that could easily be replaced by files, like books, DVD, CD and such, and downloaded. There's an economic and ecologic cost to this. People in North America will order a single book from France (often from an American company, aka Amazon, rather than a French one), only to read it once and keep it on a shelf for years. That's fun, but irresponsible, when they could get the same content digitally. Physical copies are extremely wasteful, much like disposable plastic bags for shopping, and will gradually vanish the same way, or more likely become luxury goods, to be taxed to compensate for the waste and hidden costs. They take material and energy to produce, they need a lot of transportation, more oil and pollution. They need retailers to reach the end consummer, which with production and distribution raise the cost of the product. And there's the defective copies, and all the unsold quantities, that too the consumers end up paying for, in more ways than one. Audio/Video formats evolve fast, and those obsolete products end up a few years later on trash piles (like billions of VHS tapes now have), which we also pay for. The more people buy online and abroad, the more significant this gets, and the sooner people will switch to digital formats and downloading for their purchases of cultural products like books, DVD, music (which makes for a great deal of the international online retailing, right now), the better for everyone.

The movie professional are completing the transition, and it went damn fast. Well, it started slowly at first a few years ago, with a few corporations leading the way, but suddenly within a year, we went from receiving (and eventually returning) tons of material to Studios refusing to deliver any physical media, and to do business with facilities without which they had set up a secured fiber optic line. Most laboratories printing and distributing copies to theaters have either closed down in the last two years, or have entered a shutdown phase. Backward theaters are warned they won't have any choice but to be set up for secured reception and projection of digital files (that has gone faster than expected in the field, actually). It's matter of a few more years before something similar happens on the home market. In fact, it's solidly started with music already, and for e-books and readers the increase in popularity is impressively fast.

It's a lot of work, money and resources for the content producers to put all those physical products on the market, ensure they have good distributors in all the markets they want to reach, make sure their products are properly dealt with by retailers. And they're already facing the reality that many of their traditional retailers are closing, or reducing their inventories and being extremely selective in the titles they offer, and they more and more have to focus on being visible on the net, and with the net retailers.

The physical products won't disappear overnight (nor soon - I think it's books that are likely to survive the longest of all), but their market is likely to shrink more and more over the years, and they will get harder to find locally without online ordering, and sooner or later the producers will stop offering in that form the titles no longer profitable.

Of course there may be a sudden wave of nostalgia that could bring back some things or delay the transition, but it would have to happen fairly soon, which I doubt it will. Most people I know, though many have not switched to digital files, don't care one way or another for physical copies as objects. An important factor that might accelerate things is that tons of people are already quite used to buying only digital files for music, and to love it. A major factor slowing things down for movies is that except for rentals, the prices aren't good enough. They want to see the same drop there was for music. 19,99$ for the digital file of a movie is way, way overpriced - an encouragement to piracy. It's the same price as a DVD, and that is't in any way normal. It's the content producer trying to get the customers used to the idea that pricing won't change, while in fact it's that way because they've increased their profit margin.