The Business: Digital-Only Not Long-Term Viable

People are acting crazy. We've got companies that run streaming services digitally editing old movies and shows to conform to whatever Woke insanity is the flavor of the month. We already have instances of digital books being editted or deleted by the same companies. In short, the promise of digital media--especially streaming--is now showing clearly the downsides that detractors have long said to lurk in the background.

Now that the subtext is the text, as it were, it's time to recommit to (re)building and maintaining a physical media library and the means to display it. For books, this means Returning To Tradition and putting hardcovers and paperbacks back on those shelves. For films, videogames, television, and audio this means buying or burning to disc and keeping machines on hand that can play them (and yes, this means also the means to repair them or duplicates to replace them).

And if you do buy on digital platforms, you need the means to actually own and use what you buy. GOG makes this easy; you can just download the files to a local drive and form there do whatever. Steam does not make this easy, and I'm not the one to ask on how to do it as I don't know. Breaking your Kindle ebooks out of your Kindle device so you can put them on external drives is also something you ought to look up. (Ditto any other DRM-enabled ebooks you have.)

Remember that if your entertainment needs an Internet connection to function, you don't own it- you rent. That can be cancelled, temporarily or permanently, at any time and you have nothing if you have no connection (or electricity). Putting everything you use to inform and entertain yourself into digital resources that you don't control and have close at hand means that you risk having it seize from you easily.

Put the books back on the shelves, the discs back in the racks, and keep files on local drives in your home. (Get a generator and keep it ready to use at a moment's notice.) This is how you ensure you have media for the long-term, because streaming wasn't here yesterday and it may not be here tomorrow. Don't lose what you love to a transient trend.