FinishingDutch

You’re absolutely right in that it’s a risk.

But you can always buy a CD or digital album and rip the DRM off it. Or pirate it. Assuming you care enough to do that anyways.

Me, I’m not really a music fan. Only reason I have YT Music is because it’s included with YT Premium. So it’s not going to bother me much if certain songs or albums disappear. I’ll just listen to other stuff. Music is merely background noise to me.

Except a physical library can only hold so many books, they don’t have most of the books I want and you need to return them. A physical library is not useful to me.

I usually use Anna’s Archive or Lib Gen, depending on what’s actually up and working. Anna scrapes Zlib as well as other sources. Usually that’s where I can find the really obscure stuff.

I am aware of them, yes. It’s not the book download site that I use personally, but you can never have enough options.

Sure, no platform will have everything. But for me personally, on YouTube Music, I’ve always been able to find what I was looking for. But I’m admittedly not what you’d call a music aficionado.

Yes, a lot of them do. But their digital selection often is pretty limited and comes with restrictions.

For example: our Dutch national online library lets you ‘borrow’ 10 e-books at a time. You get 21 days to read a book, but you can extend that one time by another three weeks. After that, you have to ‘return’ and ‘check them out again’ if you want to continue reading. With my particular reading habits, that’s a hassle and wouldn’t work for me.

But the biggest issue is: they only offer a limited selection. Basically, NONE of the books I’m reading now are available through that system.

I want to be able to read every book I want, no time restriction. And that’s not possible with the current digital library system they offer.

Piracy was, is and remains a service problem, as Gabe Newell of Valve (Steam) once stated. Most people are perfectly content to pay a reasonable price to get access to the things they want. But if you make that impossible, they’ll find other options.

Take anime for example: even if you subscribed to every streaming service out there, you still wouldn’t be able to see everything you wanted. Some things aren’t streamable or sold ANYWHERE, or only on a service that’s actively blocked in your region. Which means there is simply no legal way for you at all to get that content.

Music on the other hand solved that dilemma. You can use Spotify, YT Music, Apple Music or a host of other options. You pay a flat fee and you can listen to pretty much every song you want, as often as you want. Nobody’s pirating MP3’s these days, because nobody needs to. It’s now more convenient to just stream it.

I’d really like to see someone do the same for books. An unlimited digital library that lets you download anything you want for a flat subscription fee. I’d pay 10 bucks a month for that for sure. Because that would make it more convenient than pirating is right now, with a more consistent experience.

I just buy physicals of the reference books I really want and pirate the digitals of anything else that isn’t sold DRM-free. I WILL own what I bought, whether they like it or not.

In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.

The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.

Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there's no real ‘community’.

The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.

I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.

My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.

But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…

Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.

It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.

Welcome! We can definitely still use a few more people, especially if they’re willing to contribute to content.

Well, if by ‘similar priced’ you mean: a very cheap player, it might make sense.

But in 2004, I carried an iPod 4G which had either 20 or 40 gigabytes of storage. You’d need a backpack full of MD’s to match that, even if you put lower quality songs on there. I had my iPod filled with everything from podcasts, audiobooks, complete albums and enough random music to never hear the same song in a month. Absolutely loved that iPod!