I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy? Netflix killed any remaining point to owning them. I have boxes and boxes of DVDs in the basement, no longer having any meaning.

As for my large music collection, I listen to that every day (set on random shuffle). I enjoy it very much, and it's large enough that I don't overplay ones I like and ruin them.

I do hoard books and magazines, though. My huge book collection isn't remotely available via googling them, nor are most available as ebooks. And old magazines? fuggedaboudit.

So I cut & scan books as a background task, such as when waiting for a test suite to complete. Each book consumes 20 to 30 Mb, so that adds up. The scanned paper copy goes in the recycle bin, and I enjoy using a tablet or netbook to access my library from anywhere in the house, at any time.

I only wish my ebook readers had enough storage to put my whole library on them (about 60Gb now, and growing daily).

Totally with you when it comes to movies.

Regarding music, I see albums as integral wholes, so I very rarely listen to a single track, and almost never use the "shuffle" feature of my music player. When working, I just play an album in its entirety- I have about ~80 albums that I would say make up for 90% of the music I listen to (and I've been slowly but surely collecting the vinyls for these albums- there's something nice about owning a physical object containing the very essence of something I love). For this very reason, I have loved Spotify ever since I got in its early days beta, and have never gotten the appeal of services like Pandora/Rdio/etc.

I do have a quite large collection physical books, most of them on various academic topics. I wouldn't want to have them in a digital format: because of their low print runs, they are comparatively expensive and hard to find, so I have some (shameful) pride in my curated collection; additionally, it'd be hard to read them digitally because you often go back and forth between sections, which is a nightmare on a tablet. I tried using a kindle for reading novels, and I really loved it; but after a year or so, I just naturally migrated back to physical paperbacks. Not sure why, but being able to have a nice curated collection on a bookshelf and being able to lend them painlessly definitely contributed.

Your point about magazines reminds me of all the magazines that I accumulated as a kid, that got thrown out by my parents when I moved because they would just pick up dust in the attic; oh, how I wish that I had scanned them before they did so! Sometimes I want to refer someone to some article I read years, if not decades ago, and I just can't find it because it was written in a magazine pre-ubiquitous web era.

Just a small note, I use Rdio. If it has Pandora like features, they are as off to the side as Spotify would have them. I only use Rdio to listen to whole albums I choose. Though no real reason for why Spotify/Rdio would be better than the other

Oh, my bad. I thought rdio only had radio like features like pandora.

I'm surprised that even old computer magazines are simply not available online. I subscribed to QST as a boy, I wish I had those now!

I hear what you say about expensive books, I have several that I was surprised to find out were worth more than $100. Those I just put at the back of the scan queue to decide later, there are plenty more $2 books to go first.

My comic book collection has vanished. Arggh.

One of the reasons I prefer my books digital now is I can blow them up on a large monitor - makes 'em easier to read with my old eyes. If my eyes get as bad as my dad's, I plan on installing a projector and blowing them up on the wall.

> I realized that I don't rewatch movies I've already seen, so what is the point of "owning" a copy?

Apart from that there's a couple of films I gladly re-watch (for instance when a friend hasn't seen Total Recall or Waking Life yet), I also keep them around for another reason. It's nice to be able to remember a scene or a quote and be able to look it up easily. And sometimes I do a bit of hobby/amateur sound editing, and it's a great archive of cool soundbites :)

So yeah, I'm keeping around way more than I'll ever watch or re-watch, but the nice thing about having all that storage is you don't have to worry about which data you're going to need in the future.

And for music, there's the added trouble of remembering and finding all those titles. I lost a HD with about 50GB of mp3s on it once, messy but also sorted in various ways, and I'm never going to get that exact collection back. Just over the past couple of weeks I was wrecking my brain trying to remember what was that dark post-apocalyptic ambient album I used to have--though it was a nice exercise in memory, I asked my friends they didn't know, and suddenly one morning in bed it came to me (Bad Sector - Ampos, for those who wonder) ... it's really quite amazing what tidbits of memories one can dig up if you just try hard enough and mull over it for a couple of weeks :)

Still, this discussion is more about those multi-TB harddisks than it is about keychain USB sticks, right? Although 64GB is quite a chunk.

I just want to point out that this conversation is specific to the USA. Most people in most non USA countries don't have access to the same volume and quantity of streaming content (movies, music, even magazines). Very few people would ever suggest Canadian Netflix could take the place of a good DVD library.