The Physical Media Packrat Manifesto

I recognize, of course, I'm from a different era.

I'm a collector of media. Physical media. Ever since the age of the Columbia House cassette era. I dutifully sent in my penny and occasionally bought music, enough to help me meet my agreement, but not tons of it. I was into certain types of media, and that usually meant stuff Columbia didn't have.

I'm also a buyer of books. Physical books. Yes, they are a storage headache. In my study, I have over a hundred linear feet of bookshelves, and that's still not enough. Some of the books are weighty enough they are a physical pain to read, but I still have them.

We also have a lot of DVDs. And a few months ago when my wife suggested we go through our CD collection and get rid of a bunch, I rebelled, boxed them up, and have them stored until I can figure out where they're going to go.

I have a small collection of digital music, somewhere. But again, I'm of a mind that if I want a copy of something, it's going to be a physical copy if I can find one.

That means scrabbling around the discount DVD bins at the big box store. That means finding people who're selling books that are out of print, and occasionally buying new stuff because I know I want it and I don't mind paying full price once in a while.

But whatever I have, it's mine. Only a natural disaster, not DRM or tricky digital policies, can take it away from me.

So I read Janus Rose's "The Digital Packrat Manifesto" with some interest.

As mentioned, I'm not a complete dinosaur. We purchased "The Wild Robot" from Amazon Prime not too long ago. It's definitely a movie I'd watch again. So I'm going to watch for a physical copy.

The only physical copies we're actively getting rid of are cassette tapes -- I don't think I have any of my cassette music anymore) and out VHS tapes; we're slowly working through that collection and replacing them with DVDs. Again, physical copies as much as we can manage.

Yes, they can be a storage headache. One of my summer projects is doing to be to redo our DVD shelves because what we have are sagging and no longer have enough room for the DVDs we have. But that's a small price to pay to keep physical copies in the house.

The day may come when physical copies of what's new are no longer available, and that'll be a sad day. But I'll keep packratting physical media, because once I've got it, the powers that be can't take it away from me.