I fired up World of Warcraft last night, but was distracted by an ad in the launcher for the first issue of a Worgen-themed comic series that was available online. I decided that it might be interesting – the art style was very good, and it promised an intro the history of the Worgen. I ended up spending a good half hour looking into that and other digital comics (including the first three issues of a Rifts: Planes of Telara prequel series). I spent $8 on digital comics which, at the end of the night, left me wondering if it was a wise decision.
Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed the comics and look forward to further entries in each series, but I thought about the difference between hardcopy comics and digital comics. Comics are a unique element among literature, mainly because of their historical and potential physical value as a collectable. Of course, in the heyday of comics, they weren’t bought as an investment; they were bought to read. Digital comics can’t end up as collectables because they can spawn as many copies as needed. There’s no rarity, but that also made me think: digital editions can be rare, if we don’t treat them like we’d treat hardcopies.
This goes beyond comics: music, literature, and applications are all things we can purchase online, download and use, but there’s the hidden cost of longevity. Do we back up our downloads? Do we buy from sources which will make the download available in perpetuity? What if the company offering our download goes under and vanishes, or if the content uses DRM and needs to contact a foreign server on the Internet, what happens if that server is no longer available? What about the forward march of technology? I bought these comics for use on the iPad; should I lose the iPad, I will no longer have access to these comics.
Personally, I don’t treat digital content the way I treat physical content. I have CDs and DVDs of games from the 90’s, yet I find myself re-downloading software I use on a regular basis. Part of it is the convenience of having it available to download, but that’s relying on the promise that the content will always be available. I’ve often commented to people that I don’t subscribe to the notion that one has to have a physical book in their hands to enjoy reading, but when it comes to the potential scarcity of content, I’m finding that having the non-digital version is preferred.
Do you back up your digital content, or have suffered an unrecoverable loss because you didn’t? Does it bother you either way?
I have run into this recently, as my computer was stolen, and I had not backed any data, years of photos and ripped CDs are gone. Not to mention text-based documnets. Some is recoverable. Born in a differnet era, I prefer to purchase CDs over downloding from iTunes or Amazon. But some stuff is gone forever.
ReplyDeleteAs a fairly new Kindle owner, longevity is one of the primary factors in whether or not I go with an electronic or a paper edition. I have some favorite authors that I know I'll want to be able to reread in ten years, so I go with the dead-tree version.
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