6 ms·

Physical Media Has To Go. I'm Digital Only From Here.

35 points by srikar 16y ago

jbri 16y ago
This is an interesting standpoint, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Ebooks have made vast strides recently, but there's just something about leafing through a book that they just can't seem to match. Perhaps it's the nostalgia talking, but reading a novel on a Kindle just seems a whole lot more sterile than an actual paperback. Even for reference materials, ebooks still seem like the bastard child of a reference textbook and a proper hyperlinked manual.
- louismg 16y ago
  The argument could similarly be made for watching feature films on a TV set with surround sound versus a theater. Ebooks aren't as beautiful (yet) as their hardback cousins, but they are instant, portable, and greener to boot!
  - pstack 16y ago
    Also, you don't have to worry about your pages becoming dog-eared. Or getting finger-grease or smudges on them. Or spines being worn or bent. If you grew up a book nerd, just thinking about these things happening to a physical book can make you squirm. With an eBook, the most you need is a cloth to wipe your reader display! Also, there's definitely something to be said not only for carrying your book around on a light device, but carrying up to thousands of them around on a single light device. (Though, on the other hand, how often are you going to need to go back and read most of your non-reference books after you've finished them?).
    - hammerdr 16y ago
      Oddly enough, my non-reference books have become reference books because of their ease of access. For example, I was once trying to explain how a simple shift in perspective can lead to radical changes in behavior. Pulled out Ender's Game and a blurb of "the gate is down" as a 'concrete' example. As a book nerd, you often relate to books in response to certain situations. Instead of summarizing, we can now quickly access the eloquent prose of a gifted author that had time to express herself :)
    - mirkules 16y ago
      Interestingly, I find old books charming, especially ones with signs of wear and age. Kind of like a sturdy old table with nicks and bruises or a skillet with scrapes and scratches. I think eBooks are fine for "on-the-go," but hard copies certainly have a place on my bookshelf. In time, hard copies will become a niche product, one you use while sitting in your easy chair on a cold winter night. Everyone thought the radio will die with the advent of TV, but it just found a niche (nobody listens to the radio in their house, but they do in their car). As a side note, the OP said that he prefers reference books as hard copy books. When I think of reference books though, I think searchable content, which means I want my references to be in eBook format.
      - erikpukinskis 16y ago
        The radio/TV comparison is a little off. Radio is a fundamentally different experience than TV: it doesn't require sight. So that allows it to occupy it's rather substantial niche. Paper books still have some interface advantages over ebooks (as several people have described in this thread) but they'll go away as people build proper, well designed ebook readers. When that happens, all books will have going for them is nostalgia and a pleasant physical experience that can't be replicated digitally. I think a much more apt comparison is records, which don't provide a fundamentally different sonic experience, but do have nostalgia and physicality. So I think a handful of book lovers will still have collections, and visit the bookstore down the street, but like record players, and unlike radios, I think the vast majority of the population won't have any.
    - rmc 16y ago
      there's definitely something to be said not only for carrying your book around on a light device, but carrying up to thousands of them around on a single light device. Definitly. There's something exhilerating about bringing all your books with you. There are practical advantages aswell. I'm going on a 3 week holiday to australia soon. Previously I'd have to deciede what books I want to bring with me (since I couldn't take them all). Now I don't have to think about it. I just take my kindle and I know I have all my books.
- riffraff 16y ago
  I'm afraid it's the nostalgia talking, and we are dinosaurs. I do find interesting that very little people feel attached to tape/VHS/CDROM/DVDs though, while there are plenty who will swear that books in dead tree form are better than digital media. Then again, I don't know how to write a love note on the front page of ebooks I'm giving as gift, and they are still not bathtub-compliant :)
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    Not yet it isn't. Most of the books I own are bigger than the pocket-paperback size the Kindle and competitors use. When there's a magazine-size screen with slightly faster switching, then I'll jump on it. I also find navigating a book-length document on a laptop or something quite tedious. When I'm reading a complex book (where I often want to refer to the index, endnotes, or photographs) I will often have several fingers folded in at the relevant pages and can jump around quite quickly.
    - dman 16y ago
      Agree with everything you said but Book index quality has been going down pretty sharply off late. For some tech books I read recently the index was basically the function calls from the code samples and the Section headings.
      - anigbrowl 16y ago
        It's not limited to programming books, more's the pity.
  - jbri 16y ago
    I think the difference there is that all of those are just storage devices - you can't just look at a DVD and see the movie, you already need a playback device in order to watch it. Given that, playing it back on the same device without having any external storage media is basically just cutting out the middleman. Introducing a playback device (such as going from book -> Kindle + ebook) is quite different, I think.
  - 16y ago
- rmc 16y ago
  I recently got a Kindle and I'm convinced. It's the future. I'm reading much much books. Reading on a Kindle is superiour to reading a dead tree.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  I used to think this until I got a Kindle - I was almost determined that it wouldn't be as good as paper - but I now find it infuriating when I can't get something as an eBook. For novels the difference (for me at least) is that the Kindle makes it easier to focus on actually reading. I was surprised by this but turning a page is a small nudge of the thumb and your focus remains on the text, the device is light enough that holding it in the same position for an extended period or getting comfortable in bed or in a chair is far easier than for a book (even a paperback - and the difference between the Kindle and a hardback or trade paperback isn't even funny). Small barriers that you weren't even really aware of that are either taken away or noticeably reduced. Of course there's all the additional stuff - buying books instantly nearly anywhere, carrying a whole library in your pocket and so on - but they turn out to be bells and whistles. The real difference is that it's just a better device for consuming text. For reference books (at least large ones) the Kindle isn't there yet (layout, searching, colour and a few other key things) but without having hands on experience I can see the iPad could well remove most of those issues at which point searching and electronic notes, combined with reduced bulk (the iPad is heavy but not next to a 500 page programming book) likely give it an edge over paper.
pstack 16y ago
When you can get more movies and television than you could ever consume for only $8/mo and ten million songs for only $5/mo, it's hard to argue. I mean, would you rather pay $30 for a Bluray that you'll watch once (twice, to be generous) or spend that $30 on almost four months of on-demand content? Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music? In a world where you not only need serials and registration to play multi-player games, but many single player games, it's becoming difficult to even argue against digital download game services, like Steam (on which I currently have 400+ games). Hell, you don't even have to concern yourself with shelf space, theft, loss, or damage anymore. The problem is that you also have to accept several negatives. Like DRM or the inability to resell a purchased book, album, movie, or game. The problem is that you have to make several leaps of faith, too. Faith that the source of your content will still be around for the length of time that you'd own the physical version (several generations, in the case of books). Faith that their DRM won't bite you in the ass. Faith that something won't happen to your account which restricts your access to your content and that if it does, their customer services is accessible and responsive. Faith that they won't suddenly yank content you've already paid. Faith that they won't do any dirty aggregation or data mining as you use content that you own. I'm all for digital, but I think we need some serious commitment from publishers and distributors and content warehouses before we continue making huge investments into what is essentially a collection of content licenses. An industry-enforced sort of "bill of digital content consumer rights" wouldn't be unreasonable.
- louismg 16y ago
  All good points. The issue we're facing with DRM, upgradability etc is similar to that faced with moving from LPs to Cassettes to CDs to MP3s to... Books decay. Digital files get corrupted. Companies rise and fall. I know I'll end up buying things more than once, just like I did with my Depeche Mode collection - at least three times.
  - pstack 16y ago
    That's one of the big points of contention, for me. If I am purchasing a digital copy of your content, then I am essentially purchasing nothing but a license to use that content and it should therefore be your job to ensure I can continue to access that content for the rest of my life (or longer, if we figure out the whole management of digital copies of things so I can give my library to my nephew when I die or something). When you are changing the physical media, it's a little more understandable (even though you're still really just giving me a license to the content on it and nothing else). When it's already in digital format, it's no longer acceptable to play that sucker's game, as far as I'm concerned.
dman 16y ago
Ive been loving people and libraries going digital. I snagged several physical books that were out of print in the last year at prices I never imagined a couple of years back. examples - etudes for programmers, introduction to functional programming etc for < 20$'s. On Lisp for < 30 bucks still eludes me though.
wladimir 16y ago
Does anyone know of a Linux compatible archive system for scanned paper? It doesn't really have to OCR, but should allow for tagging and searching. I would really like to get rid of my stacks of old (administrative) paper, and the ones that I still receive through snailmail. DVDs/CDs/books don't bother me as much, as they look nice, but those binders with crappy old paper I can't wait to throw it out.
- viraptor 16y ago
  I tried to find something and failed. Nowadays, I just upload to zoho apps and tag the documents there.
  - wladimir 16y ago
    That's a good option, I might consider that. The advantage is that it makes the documents accessible from everywhere. On the other hand, as it is a cloud service, you have to trust them to keep the data. Do they make it possible to access/backup your documents through some API? Hm I guess in that case I could simply use Google documents as well. Seems that it even (experimentally) supports OCR: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#OCR http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...
stef25 16y ago
Personally I like to take my eyes away from a screen every now and then. Books FTW.
- grinich 16y ago
  Have you tried the newest Kindle? I've found that I actually read more with it since it's so easy to carry around.
  - robin_reala 16y ago
    Can I carry it into the bath and read it there? I’m not sure why ebook reader manufacturers aren’t tapping this market.
    - robgough 16y ago
      I thought people were just putting them inside large sandwich bags? !! DISCLAIMER - I've not been brave enough to try this with my iPad2 yet
      - robin_reala 16y ago
        Guess that’d work but yep, would be a little frightening. Seems like an obvious thing for the Kindle to get though. Give it wifi/3G for data transfer and Touchstone (or equivalent) for power transfer, and you don’t need a single port. Then just seal the case up.
    - jonknee 16y ago
      http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html Questions for Jeff Bezos Q: What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub? A: I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons. Q: What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub? A: If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.
uast23 16y ago
Everything else was/is indeed destined to move to its digital form sooner or later no matter how much the physical good producer regrets it; but you cannot take it away from physical books. Ebooks are handy. They are portable, safe from wear and tear, cheap and what not. But what about those moments when you really need to take your eyes away off the screen but still want to be productive or have some quality time reading. This might be just a personal POV, but over the time looking at screen becomes so usual that you need an extra physical thing to get that kick. In my case it's physical books.
nodata 16y ago
Digital stuff is still fairly new - most people, at least until recently, preferred real world stuff. So it makes sense that digital is cheaper. But relying on its cheapness doesn't make sense since there is no guarantee that digital will stay cheaper once more people switch.
Jabbles 16y ago
What service fills the void that refusing to buy Blu-Rays opens? Saying "DVD quality is good enough" and using a streaming service is in the same line as "Paper books are good enough".
cabalamat 16y ago
Is there a name for the annoying pop-ups and stay-ups that go on the top and bottom of web pages these days? If not, may I nominate "dickbar"?
agentultra 16y ago
I can imagine reading a linear text is quite unobtrusive on a Kindle. I got one for my mother and she loves it. The display on it is really crisp, it's light, and she has access to a vast library of books. I still cannot fathom owning one. Digital media has a lot of social issues to work out. A book doesn't come with a TOS or EULA. The media the story comes on doesn't require a special licensed reader from the book store. It doesn't come crippled with DRM and anti-circumvention laws. (And as far as books are concerned, e-readers are crap for anything but linear text as far as I'm concerned.) That being said, the majority of my media is digital these days. I even buy pure digital copies of my console games. It's very convenient, but as an investment it's practically worthless. The formats for this stuff are not universal and require special hardware to use them. I've bought Super Mario Bros. 3 at least 4 or 5 times in my life. I still have my copy of the Lord of the Rings that I've read 4 or 5 times in my life and it required no special hardware or work arounds. I wouldn't have to have bought that game so many times if emulators and backups were fully legal. The technology is awesome. We're just not ready as a society yet to commit to it.

35 points by srikar 16y ago

jbri 16y ago

This is an interesting standpoint, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Ebooks have made vast strides recently, but there's just something about leafing through a book that they just can't seem to match. Perhaps it's the nostalgia talking, but reading a novel on a Kindle just seems a whole lot more sterile than an actual paperback. Even for reference materials, ebooks still seem like the bastard child of a reference textbook and a proper hyperlinked manual.

louismg 16y ago
The argument could similarly be made for watching feature films on a TV set with surround sound versus a theater. Ebooks aren't as beautiful (yet) as their hardback cousins, but they are instant, portable, and greener to boot!
- pstack 16y ago
  Also, you don't have to worry about your pages becoming dog-eared. Or getting finger-grease or smudges on them. Or spines being worn or bent. If you grew up a book nerd, just thinking about these things happening to a physical book can make you squirm. With an eBook, the most you need is a cloth to wipe your reader display! Also, there's definitely something to be said not only for carrying your book around on a light device, but carrying up to thousands of them around on a single light device. (Though, on the other hand, how often are you going to need to go back and read most of your non-reference books after you've finished them?).
  - hammerdr 16y ago
    Oddly enough, my non-reference books have become reference books because of their ease of access. For example, I was once trying to explain how a simple shift in perspective can lead to radical changes in behavior. Pulled out Ender's Game and a blurb of "the gate is down" as a 'concrete' example. As a book nerd, you often relate to books in response to certain situations. Instead of summarizing, we can now quickly access the eloquent prose of a gifted author that had time to express herself :)
  - mirkules 16y ago
    Interestingly, I find old books charming, especially ones with signs of wear and age. Kind of like a sturdy old table with nicks and bruises or a skillet with scrapes and scratches. I think eBooks are fine for "on-the-go," but hard copies certainly have a place on my bookshelf. In time, hard copies will become a niche product, one you use while sitting in your easy chair on a cold winter night. Everyone thought the radio will die with the advent of TV, but it just found a niche (nobody listens to the radio in their house, but they do in their car). As a side note, the OP said that he prefers reference books as hard copy books. When I think of reference books though, I think searchable content, which means I want my references to be in eBook format.
    - erikpukinskis 16y ago
      The radio/TV comparison is a little off. Radio is a fundamentally different experience than TV: it doesn't require sight. So that allows it to occupy it's rather substantial niche. Paper books still have some interface advantages over ebooks (as several people have described in this thread) but they'll go away as people build proper, well designed ebook readers. When that happens, all books will have going for them is nostalgia and a pleasant physical experience that can't be replicated digitally. I think a much more apt comparison is records, which don't provide a fundamentally different sonic experience, but do have nostalgia and physicality. So I think a handful of book lovers will still have collections, and visit the bookstore down the street, but like record players, and unlike radios, I think the vast majority of the population won't have any.
  - rmc 16y ago
    there's definitely something to be said not only for carrying your book around on a light device, but carrying up to thousands of them around on a single light device. Definitly. There's something exhilerating about bringing all your books with you. There are practical advantages aswell. I'm going on a 3 week holiday to australia soon. Previously I'd have to deciede what books I want to bring with me (since I couldn't take them all). Now I don't have to think about it. I just take my kindle and I know I have all my books.
riffraff 16y ago
I'm afraid it's the nostalgia talking, and we are dinosaurs. I do find interesting that very little people feel attached to tape/VHS/CDROM/DVDs though, while there are plenty who will swear that books in dead tree form are better than digital media. Then again, I don't know how to write a love note on the front page of ebooks I'm giving as gift, and they are still not bathtub-compliant :)
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  Not yet it isn't. Most of the books I own are bigger than the pocket-paperback size the Kindle and competitors use. When there's a magazine-size screen with slightly faster switching, then I'll jump on it. I also find navigating a book-length document on a laptop or something quite tedious. When I'm reading a complex book (where I often want to refer to the index, endnotes, or photographs) I will often have several fingers folded in at the relevant pages and can jump around quite quickly.
  - dman 16y ago
    Agree with everything you said but Book index quality has been going down pretty sharply off late. For some tech books I read recently the index was basically the function calls from the code samples and the Section headings.
    - anigbrowl 16y ago
      It's not limited to programming books, more's the pity.
- jbri 16y ago
  I think the difference there is that all of those are just storage devices - you can't just look at a DVD and see the movie, you already need a playback device in order to watch it. Given that, playing it back on the same device without having any external storage media is basically just cutting out the middleman. Introducing a playback device (such as going from book -> Kindle + ebook) is quite different, I think.
- 16y ago
rmc 16y ago
I recently got a Kindle and I'm convinced. It's the future. I'm reading much much books. Reading on a Kindle is superiour to reading a dead tree.
Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
I used to think this until I got a Kindle - I was almost determined that it wouldn't be as good as paper - but I now find it infuriating when I can't get something as an eBook. For novels the difference (for me at least) is that the Kindle makes it easier to focus on actually reading. I was surprised by this but turning a page is a small nudge of the thumb and your focus remains on the text, the device is light enough that holding it in the same position for an extended period or getting comfortable in bed or in a chair is far easier than for a book (even a paperback - and the difference between the Kindle and a hardback or trade paperback isn't even funny). Small barriers that you weren't even really aware of that are either taken away or noticeably reduced. Of course there's all the additional stuff - buying books instantly nearly anywhere, carrying a whole library in your pocket and so on - but they turn out to be bells and whistles. The real difference is that it's just a better device for consuming text. For reference books (at least large ones) the Kindle isn't there yet (layout, searching, colour and a few other key things) but without having hands on experience I can see the iPad could well remove most of those issues at which point searching and electronic notes, combined with reduced bulk (the iPad is heavy but not next to a 500 page programming book) likely give it an edge over paper.

pstack 16y ago

When you can get more movies and television than you could ever consume for only $8/mo and ten million songs for only $5/mo, it's hard to argue. I mean, would you rather pay $30 for a Bluray that you'll watch once (twice, to be generous) or spend that $30 on almost four months of on-demand content? Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music? In a world where you not only need serials and registration to play multi-player games, but many single player games, it's becoming difficult to even argue against digital download game services, like Steam (on which I currently have 400+ games). Hell, you don't even have to concern yourself with shelf space, theft, loss, or damage anymore. The problem is that you also have to accept several negatives. Like DRM or the inability to resell a purchased book, album, movie, or game. The problem is that you have to make several leaps of faith, too. Faith that the source of your content will still be around for the length of time that you'd own the physical version (several generations, in the case of books). Faith that their DRM won't bite you in the ass. Faith that something won't happen to your account which restricts your access to your content and that if it does, their customer services is accessible and responsive. Faith that they won't suddenly yank content you've already paid. Faith that they won't do any dirty aggregation or data mining as you use content that you own. I'm all for digital, but I think we need some serious commitment from publishers and distributors and content warehouses before we continue making huge investments into what is essentially a collection of content licenses. An industry-enforced sort of "bill of digital content consumer rights" wouldn't be unreasonable.

louismg 16y ago
All good points. The issue we're facing with DRM, upgradability etc is similar to that faced with moving from LPs to Cassettes to CDs to MP3s to... Books decay. Digital files get corrupted. Companies rise and fall. I know I'll end up buying things more than once, just like I did with my Depeche Mode collection - at least three times.
- pstack 16y ago
  That's one of the big points of contention, for me. If I am purchasing a digital copy of your content, then I am essentially purchasing nothing but a license to use that content and it should therefore be your job to ensure I can continue to access that content for the rest of my life (or longer, if we figure out the whole management of digital copies of things so I can give my library to my nephew when I die or something). When you are changing the physical media, it's a little more understandable (even though you're still really just giving me a license to the content on it and nothing else). When it's already in digital format, it's no longer acceptable to play that sucker's game, as far as I'm concerned.

dman 16y ago

Ive been loving people and libraries going digital. I snagged several physical books that were out of print in the last year at prices I never imagined a couple of years back. examples - etudes for programmers, introduction to functional programming etc for < 20$'s. On Lisp for < 30 bucks still eludes me though.

wladimir 16y ago

Does anyone know of a Linux compatible archive system for scanned paper? It doesn't really have to OCR, but should allow for tagging and searching. I would really like to get rid of my stacks of old (administrative) paper, and the ones that I still receive through snailmail. DVDs/CDs/books don't bother me as much, as they look nice, but those binders with crappy old paper I can't wait to throw it out.

viraptor 16y ago
I tried to find something and failed. Nowadays, I just upload to zoho apps and tag the documents there.
- wladimir 16y ago
  That's a good option, I might consider that. The advantage is that it makes the documents accessible from everywhere. On the other hand, as it is a cloud service, you have to trust them to keep the data. Do they make it possible to access/backup your documents through some API? Hm I guess in that case I could simply use Google documents as well. Seems that it even (experimentally) supports OCR: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#OCR http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_gu...

stef25 16y ago

Personally I like to take my eyes away from a screen every now and then. Books FTW.

grinich 16y ago
Have you tried the newest Kindle? I've found that I actually read more with it since it's so easy to carry around.
- robin_reala 16y ago
  Can I carry it into the bath and read it there? I’m not sure why ebook reader manufacturers aren’t tapping this market.
  - robgough 16y ago
    I thought people were just putting them inside large sandwich bags? !! DISCLAIMER - I've not been brave enough to try this with my iPad2 yet
    - robin_reala 16y ago
      Guess that’d work but yep, would be a little frightening. Seems like an obvious thing for the Kindle to get though. Give it wifi/3G for data transfer and Touchstone (or equivalent) for power transfer, and you don’t need a single port. Then just seal the case up.
  - jonknee 16y ago
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html Questions for Jeff Bezos Q: What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub? A: I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons. Q: What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub? A: If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.

uast23 16y ago

Everything else was/is indeed destined to move to its digital form sooner or later no matter how much the physical good producer regrets it; but you cannot take it away from physical books. Ebooks are handy. They are portable, safe from wear and tear, cheap and what not. But what about those moments when you really need to take your eyes away off the screen but still want to be productive or have some quality time reading. This might be just a personal POV, but over the time looking at screen becomes so usual that you need an extra physical thing to get that kick. In my case it's physical books.

nodata 16y ago

Digital stuff is still fairly new - most people, at least until recently, preferred real world stuff. So it makes sense that digital is cheaper. But relying on its cheapness doesn't make sense since there is no guarantee that digital will stay cheaper once more people switch.

Jabbles 16y ago

What service fills the void that refusing to buy Blu-Rays opens? Saying "DVD quality is good enough" and using a streaming service is in the same line as "Paper books are good enough".

cabalamat 16y ago

Is there a name for the annoying pop-ups and stay-ups that go on the top and bottom of web pages these days? If not, may I nominate "dickbar"?

agentultra 16y ago

I can imagine reading a linear text is quite unobtrusive on a Kindle. I got one for my mother and she loves it. The display on it is really crisp, it's light, and she has access to a vast library of books. I still cannot fathom owning one. Digital media has a lot of social issues to work out. A book doesn't come with a TOS or EULA. The media the story comes on doesn't require a special licensed reader from the book store. It doesn't come crippled with DRM and anti-circumvention laws. (And as far as books are concerned, e-readers are crap for anything but linear text as far as I'm concerned.) That being said, the majority of my media is digital these days. I even buy pure digital copies of my console games. It's very convenient, but as an investment it's practically worthless. The formats for this stuff are not universal and require special hardware to use them. I've bought Super Mario Bros. 3 at least 4 or 5 times in my life. I still have my copy of the Lord of the Rings that I've read 4 or 5 times in my life and it required no special hardware or work arounds. I wouldn't have to have bought that game so many times if emulators and backups were fully legal. The technology is awesome. We're just not ready as a society yet to commit to it.