Out damn book!

I'm done with physical media. It's taken me 10 years to realise that a small flat in London and a love of books, music, films and TV don't necessarily make for good bedfellows. After failing to find space for a book on a shelf one Monday evening a few weeks ago I came to the sudden revelation that my home was full of stuff I didn't actually use.

While my move from physical media to digital media over those last 10 tears has been almost total I've always kept my books, DVDs and CDs on the assumption that I'll read, watch or listen to them all again at some point, and then one Monday in May you suddenly realised you're standing in a shrine to stuff you no longer use but keep due to an oddly redundant emotional attachment. An emotional attachment that has taken over my living space.

The DVDs were easy to get rid of, anything I want to watch had already been ripped and was stored in iTunes. The fact that I could watch any of my films on a computer, TV, iPad or even my mobile phone had long since relegated the actual discs to ornaments.
Some of the books not long for my world
The books were trickier. As good as the availability of eBooks is today it tends to concentrate on bestsellers. Despite a desire to get rid of them all the simple fact is that the only way to read some of the books I have enjoyed is to hold them in my hands. But revelations about 'pointless stuff' and the appeal of a less cluttered living space can embolden one's killer instinct, so the pile of books to go ended up being larger than the pile to stay.

Which brings me to the main area of my failure. Music. The mountain of stuff to go contained not a single CD. That's not an exaggeration, the culling within the ranks of books and DVDs was frankly brutal, but I couldn't bring myself to dispose of even a single CD. Not a one. The irony of this is not lost on me, music was the first thing to move to the digital realm, and the most complete. I haven't purchased music on physical media for several years now, yet it was the one area I couldn't make a even the slightest cut.

Moving images and books are an immersive experience which demand and reward attention, but music is different. I clean, cook, work, drive and walk to music, it has become the internal soundtrack to my life and I think that it why it's bond is so much more difficult to break. I can't see myself buying another CD in my life, but I know that in 10 years time those boxes of CDs will still be stored in that cupboard.