Audio Edition Coming Soon!
My brother Daniel had to do a sanity check while I was perusing Ebay: “Sis, are you sure you want to buy that? I mean, you did get to watch it online already… Are you going to ever watch it again?”
The item in question was a new DVD copy of an anime from 1996 called Master of Mosquiton. It’s an OVA with only 6 episodes and the price was about $70. And Daniel’s question made me pause. It’s true that I did find an English dub online, although it took several very frustrating hours to find all six episodes in full and in English. Why was I considering spending so much money on something I had already found for free?
That got me thinking about hard copies and why I am so dedicated to filling up my home with tangible media. Why take up all this space with row after row of books when I could keep an entire library on an e-reader? Why spend $20 to get a Blu-ray or DVD when I could stream them on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime? As digital storage gets cheaper and cheaper, and the number and quality of online streaming continues to rise (not to mention the ubiquitous Cloud), why spend valuable resources collecting and maintaining hard copies?
Three reasons: Availability, Preservation, and Tangibility.
