I can fully understand your sentiment, and to some degree emotionally connect with it, but rationally: my entire bookshelf of computer science and literary classics has gone untouched since my initial read through the vast majority of books.
I keep looking around and I'm not sure that I'm happy with the "ownership" aspect of books, or a lot of stuff in general. (Having moved three times during the last six years, moving books is an awful experience).
This is probably an expression of what I've been feeling in general as of late, but I am extremely happy with the "subscriptionification" of media that's been happening. Spotify's huge library is a net win for me, as opposed to collecting albums for them to just collect dust. For me, revisiting what I used to listen to in high school by over-hearing someone's playlist has a far stronger emotional reaction than revisiting it by walking past a bookshelf.
Regarding stuff disappearing ten, twenty, thirty years from now: my experpience has been the opposite. The Internet has been getting better and better and archiving content of yesterday, and has provided better and better access to it.
My personal lean has been to own less stuff in general, which includes books, music and media in general. So needless to say, I'm pretty excited about Kindle Unlimited.
This may sound weird, but I actually love staring at my bookshelf. I often will go, pick up a book I haven't thought about in a while, and read it again. I've filled it with (mostly) timeless technical manuals, plate picture books (like pictures of the cosmos, airplanes and things like that), plenty of sci-fi, flight instruction manuals, foreign language dictionaries and other odds and ends. There are plenty of books which I'll buy on Amazon and leave on the shelf for a couple of years and I'll randomly pick one up and start reading.
I think the point here is that a bookshelf makes ideas have a geographic location. With web sites, knowledge doesn't occupy physical space and doesn't have the same permanence which a book occupies. With the bookshelf you're reminded of ideas not because they're hyperlinked together in some ever shifting zeitgeist, but because they're literally sitting right in front of you.
The (method of loci / memory palace) technique of associating information with spatial location has been used for hundreds of years and is still used today in competitions.
Latency of recall affects recombination/creativity. Same reason why native apps have a perceived UX advantage over web-based apps, even milliseconds can make a difference. Typing search terms or paging through book covers is not the same.
A couple years ago I had the idea to create some kind of projection system that would beam images of my e-books onto a wall. I'm not a hardware guy and am not sure there would be a market for it, so I didn't pursue it, but I hope someone else does.
I recently purged 60-70% of my book collection. I considered getting the remainder scanned from some place like $1 scan. I might have done it except that most of those books are picture books (art, architecture, photography, childrens). I feel like I'd be happy to let those go if I could get a non-scanned version (don't want scanned halftone dots, I want the original source). And if I had a lightweight 20+inch HD-DPI tablet to view them on.
But yes, basically I wanted to get rid of "stuff". I have notebooks of DVDs and CDs, all of which are ripped. I only keep them as "proof of license"
You can own books without owning the big, clunky physical embodiments of them that are a pain to move (and I certainly agree those are a pain to move--on my last move my book collection turned out to require 34 boxes). I own a number of books only in electronic form, and by "own" I mean that I have copies of them that I control and can read and access no matter what Amazon (or Google or any other seller of "subscriptions") might do in the future.
The issue isn't about making a value judgment on what's worth having and what's not.
Whether you like it or not, a person's social media profile is a part of their life. I'm sure you don't care about someone's photo album, or their diary, or the box full of concert ticket stubs they keep in their closet, either. But they matter to the person who kept them.
Except that now, we've grown accustomed to keeping our personal memories on Facebook, or Twitter, and used to keep them on MySpace, Friendster, and LiveJournal. "Just back it all up" you could say—but how many average everyday people even know how to do that?
The other day, I was looking for a podcast that I'd been on in 2010. Unfortunately, the site where it was hosted had undergone a refresh, and all content older than two years was gone. It reminded me just how quickly online content churns and disappears, and how even someone as backup-conscious as myself can lose digital media.
There's so much good about the planet-wide accessibility of digital data, and it's certainly better to have, say, a podcast out there that might be on thousands of computers than a cassette tape that's going to be lost or damaged in your car.
I'm simply saying that we should treat digital media as just as inviolate and permanent as physical media, and make it a better experience, not a more ephemeral one.
Consider your ancestors. How far do you have to go back before you know essentially nothing about them? I know a lot about my parents, know a few stories about my grandparents, and nothing about my great grandparents beyond a name and a couple old pictures and maybe a letter or two.
What they were, the things they possessed, are all just gone. I am not sure if that's a good thing or not, but the idea that digital storage is ushering in a new age of ephemerality is not justified.
I donate most of my books to the library because there are only a few I could imagine wanting to read again someday. It would be nice if I could donate e-books too.
Edit to add: a few years ago I decided I would probably never buy another CD, so I imported all my CDs into iTunes and donated the CDs to the library too.
I keep looking around and I'm not sure that I'm happy with the "ownership" aspect of books, or a lot of stuff in general. (Having moved three times during the last six years, moving books is an awful experience).
This is probably an expression of what I've been feeling in general as of late, but I am extremely happy with the "subscriptionification" of media that's been happening. Spotify's huge library is a net win for me, as opposed to collecting albums for them to just collect dust. For me, revisiting what I used to listen to in high school by over-hearing someone's playlist has a far stronger emotional reaction than revisiting it by walking past a bookshelf.
Regarding stuff disappearing ten, twenty, thirty years from now: my experpience has been the opposite. The Internet has been getting better and better and archiving content of yesterday, and has provided better and better access to it.
My personal lean has been to own less stuff in general, which includes books, music and media in general. So needless to say, I'm pretty excited about Kindle Unlimited.