I just wish I could put my e-books on a shelf to show how smart and well read I am. And how seriously people should take my opinion. Maybe I could just get a di

I just wish I could put my e-books on a shelf to show how smart and well read I am. And how seriously people should take my opinion. Maybe I could just get a digital e-bookshelf for hacker news actually. Anyway, this is basically the blessing and curse of digital products. It started out as "Whoah! Copying is free. Distribution is cheap. Storage is practically infinite." Then we started to see the downsides. It's so easy to make copies and distribute them that publishers won't let us. There's no incentive to move inventory to free up space so there's limited depreciation. Digital interactions are still frustrating straightjackets that artificially trap our creativity in a box invented by a designer who never really got us in the first place and thinks designing for the lowest common denominator is the essence of simplicity. So we start to miss writing in the margins and flipping through discount record bins and handing down our movie collection to our children. I guess that last one was never likely. . . remember boxes of VHS tapes? Anyway, it's not really the product's fault. It's really the market that's changed. Well, it might partly be that designer's fault. I bet that guy was all into skeuomorphism til someone told him it was stupid. Jerk.