Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet.
The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”
The situation brings to mind an interview I did over a decade ago, with the executive of a now-defunct streaming platform. He told me candidly that the goal of all this was to make digital media a “utility” like gas or electricity—a faucet that dispenses the world’s art as “content,” with tech companies in complete control of what goes in the tank and what comes out of it.
Hearing this was a real tin foil hat moment for me. For more than two decades, I’ve been what some might call a hoarder but what I’ve more affectionately dubbed a “digital packrat.” Which is to say I mostly avoid streaming services, I don’t trust any company or cloud with my digital media, and I store everything as files on devices that I physically control. My mp3 collection has been going strong since the Limewire days, I keep high-quality rips of all my movies on a local media server, and my preferred reading device holds a large collection of DRM-free ebooks and PDFs—everything from esoteric philosophy texts and scientific journals to scans of lesbian lifestyle magazines from the 1980s.
Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.
This is something I’ve always wanted to start but it’s so intimidating to think of getting a library started. Do people offer their libraries as downloads to friends? I’d assume there’s torrents of movies and book packages of genres or something, but how difficult would it be to copy them over to a group of hard drives.
I’m uninterested in piracy, but if you have a bunch of physical media, I’m happy to share my rips. And I’ll take your word on what you own. :)
Many people that have large digital libraries run something like jellyfin and let their friend stream the content
Yes, this. I’m kinda my families personal Netflix. I use Plex but I’ve been meaning to try Jellyfin.
I’ve been doing exactly this and for even longer than this guy.
Then again almost 3 decades in the Tech industry (which amongst other things means seeing several comes and goes of “providers”) have long taught me to be suspicious of being dependent on 3r party providers, and even more so of having my stuff hostage to their wills (either hosted in their machines or wrapped in encrypted envelopes which I cannot remove).
There is no actual good consumer reason for a seller of digital goods to keep it in their systems or in your own storage but encrypted, without letting the buyer have free access to what they bought.
Back when those things started a lot of people went for the convenience of encrypted Apple music on their iPods, encrypted books on their Kindles and buying videos that they could only stream never get and, inevitably, they got screwed and here we are.
I, for one, didn’t got screwed with that stuff.
Exactly.
I started with downloading mp3s on dial-up, then movies on CD-Rs.
Netflix came along and music streaming services but they always did things that seemed intentionally designed to ensure that they can leave you media-less at a moments notice. That felt very manipulative to me and so I’ve never not hosted my own media.
I’m glad people are finally tech literate enough that they’re starting to understand why controlling your own digital life is important.
It’s certainly a lot easier now. Linux offers easy access to high quality server software, tiny cheap computers and storage make the barrier to entry incredibly low.
It only takes a willingness to learn.
Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. It reminds me of when I was in college and everyone in my dorm was sharing their iTunes music libraries on the local network. I discovered so many new artists by opening up that ugly app and simply browsing through my neighbors’ collections. I even made some new friends. Mix CDs were exchanged, and browsing through unfamiliar microgenres felt like falling down a rabbit hole into a new world.
I’m really not sure here - that was true back in the days. But today? Just buy a 5TB harddrive for ~130€ and you can save several years of music there. And that part about “devoting space”? A raspberry pi with an external 2,5" hard drive is cheap and does take the space of one book or less than one shoe. Modern tech is amazing.
Safe storage is still expensive just in relative terms.
I bought 4x 16tb drives at 240€ each.
While yes, I could save every album under the sun on there, I still curate what I download/rip because I don’t wanna trash the collection with spam.
Also if you want other stuff like video files it will get tight very fast with space. Especially if you collect stuff that was hard to come by.My collection just isn’t in very good quality. For example, all the music is mp3, and the movies are 1080p max (my laptop’s creen is only 1080p anyway). I would not fill even one 16 tb disk in a lifetime.
Already achieved almost 7 tb in movie files (mid/high 1080p and some rare 4k releases)
Yeah, high-res video will eat those TB quick. I started to clean up my collection - if something really was not good, I stopped watching or lost interest, it goes into the bin. Collecting is great, but there is no reason to keep some mediocre Netflix shovelware around that was canceled after one season.
I’ve been a “digital packrat” for ages and in my experience storing things like video files in external hard-disks has been the superior option since around the time of Bluray and Xvid encoding (so, from around the mid 00s).
Further, whilst most of my collection from back in the days of recordable DVDs is stuck in them until I have the patience to transfer them (which would be many days worth of work), upgrading the harddisk storage over time as you need more storage is a breeze.
Also thanks to me using HDDs for media storage I’ve had easy access to my media collection from the comfort of my living room for almost 2 decades, since I put those disks on a homemade NAS (which for a while was an old Asus EEE PC with Linux) and had a TV Media Player on my living room connected to my TV and to the network so I could just use a remote to access the files via SMB and play them on the TV. (This was well before Android TV, and back then the Media Players were dedicated hardware solutions such as the ASUS O!Play)
On a related note, if you are fortunate enough to have a public library where you live (like many of us in the US), avail yourself of their resources. They often offer a lot more than just books.
It’s perhaps not fully in the spirit of the author, since you don’t solely own that either, but in the US at least, they’re unique public institutions owned and run by local government, not state or federal. So in a sense, you own it insomuch as your community owns it and you continue to be a part of that community.
If we have to pay for access to something we then don’t own, we may as well do it as a collective. So public libraries. Librarians in my country and city are excellent curators and, information and topics on display are more interesting and less insulting than what a pyramid scheme’s algorithm thinks I should ‘buy’ next. They’re often topical, relevant to our local community and timely. Libraries and librarians have a vested interested in books being good for us, and the service being useful to individuals and community, which goes beyond physical books also as you say. Amazon is in a race to the bottom with total disdain and disregard for readers, authors and probably even the sellers.
I am literally downloading my entire Spotify collection as high quality OGG Vorbis files. Ready for the future, however it will look like.
If I’d want the max/lossless quality, should I choose m4a/aac or ogg/vorbis
You would need to do some research yourself, I am no expert in this… ogg/vorbis was an option for me, and it checks my requirements (high quality, acceptable size, supported on android).
Hoped you had already an opinion I could base my research on.
Will try to find some info.
Edgelords. The author makes it sound like only the recent Kindle change is what convinced them to pirate. Sure…
I’d imagine that’s the case for a lot of people actually. People don’t just pirate to get things for free. Lots of people buy easily pirateable games on GOG because it doesn’t have DRM. Lots of people buy and rip Blu-rays instead of torrenting movies.
Yup, I buy and rip Blu-rays, but I’ll probably buy and torrent them instead at some point because ripping them is a pain.
If there’s a reasonable legal avenue to get something in a format I can use, I’ll do that. If not, I’ll either pirate or go without.
If I were buying a disk just to rip, I would rather buy a digital copy just to correspond to the downloaded file. I do that with Steam games. I would throw the disk out immediately after anyway.
A physical copy means:
- I have proof that I own it
- I can rerip if my NAS dies
- I can loan it to friends
Instead of reripping, I can just recopy from a backup drive, which is easier. And I can loan it to people too if I load it onto a USB drive or, y’know, just send the file online.
You can use programs like Ripper or Automated Ripping Machine to watch for inserted disks and rip them automatically. You can even add remixing or transcoding into the workflow so that all you do is insert the disk into the drive and after some time out pops the file in the exact format and size you want, even directly into your media library if you want.
I got all my media ripped, so I’m good for now, and incremental updates are pretty easy.
But I can forsee a time when my bluray drive dies or something and torrenting is easier.
