Not the guy you were asking but... I do a lot of self-study, and I use Calibre (ebook library software) to organise my reading materials. I used it because my

Not the guy you were asking but... I do a lot of self-study, and I use Calibre (ebook library software) to organise my reading materials. I used it because my Linux file browser has problems displaying covers for EPUB files. (And a couple of other) I like that my reading material has lots of ways for me to organise it without creating duplicates (tags mainly) search and browse my books. Then one evening I found myself wishing I could have all my other relevant 'files' in the same system: audio, video, source code, repos, blogs, podcasts, notes etc... Basically a metadata rich database - except not really a database in my case as I need to pull in 'stuff' from all over the place, and not only on one device. Files are nice, and I hate anything that takes away my ability to organise stuff on a physical level (which, truth be told Calibre stubbornly refuses to let you set up your folder system, so I cheat by using tags) but at the same time, the problem with the skeuomorphic paradigm of files and folder is that there are so many more options open in the digital world than in the real world when dealing with items. Imagine being able to sit at your office desk and open the drawer to pull out a piece of paper. When you look at the paper it shows you some text. Rotate the paper to the left and the text disappears and a video starts playing, turn it to the right and you hear a podcast, place it on your desk and 4 more pieces of paper appear next to it - or it calls someone relevant to the info. All possible with digital info, but not with a real piece of paper - yet. That is the only thing I see as a real negative about files and folders - it may be limiting what we can really do with our digital world because we're stuck in a file-system metaphor created hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.