My Life In Fandom: On The Importance Of Physical Media

A little talk about physical media. First, to whet the appetite, Jon del Arroz's video from yesterday on collector's editions.

Looks sweet, don't they?

But this is a serious matter. What we've seen this year is the fulfillment of warnings many issued back when corporations started pushing digital media business models years ago; content will be edited, changed, revised, or revoked even if you paid for it because you don't own it; you just own a revocable license to access it.

I am not calling for the abolishing of digital publishing. It has its place, especially where periodical publications are concerned (e.g. newspapers), but digital has issues when it comes to long-term archiving and preservation. Even if the corporate actors are wholly above-board and utterly ethical in their administration of what they own, changes in technology alone can and do lead to loss of media over time. Without careful attention paid to preserve those creations in forms that end-users can easily employ, bad actors can turn digital media into mind control right out of 1984; be it as small as taking out a word to reflect Current Year or as big as removing something entirely.

I am calling for people to purchase, acquire, and maintain physical media collections for anything they enjoy and wish to pass on generations down the line- and that includes maintaining the capacity to playback that media if it is a film or television series. If you've been neglecting that, stop; do it as you afford it, but do it. You've seen that corporate owners can't be trusted, and activists in the libraries can be just as fucky given the right prompts.

And as my birthday is just over a month away, I'd be quite happy if I got physical media as presents.

And yes it is for these reasons that "Hounds of Nimrod" will be available in paperback, as Reavers is already, and all Star Knight books to come. Even if Amazon's digital business collapses, and your Kindle libraries with it, so long as print publishing is available then so shall your ability to get my stuff. I may be disrupted, but only death can really hope to end it- and if I set things up right, not even then.