You’re absolutely right in that it’s a risk.

But you can always buy a CD or digital album and rip the DRM off it. Or pirate it. Assuming you care enough to do that anyways.

Me, I’m not really a music fan. Only reason I have YT Music is because it’s included with YT Premium. So it’s not going to bother me much if certain songs or albums disappear. I’ll just listen to other stuff. Music is merely background noise to me.

Except a physical library can only hold so many books, they don’t have most of the books I want and you need to return them. A physical library is not useful to me.

I usually use Anna’s Archive or Lib Gen, depending on what’s actually up and working. Anna scrapes Zlib as well as other sources. Usually that’s where I can find the really obscure stuff.

I am aware of them, yes. It’s not the book download site that I use personally, but you can never have enough options.

Sure, no platform will have everything. But for me personally, on YouTube Music, I’ve always been able to find what I was looking for. But I’m admittedly not what you’d call a music aficionado.

Yes, a lot of them do. But their digital selection often is pretty limited and comes with restrictions.

For example: our Dutch national online library lets you ‘borrow’ 10 e-books at a time. You get 21 days to read a book, but you can extend that one time by another three weeks. After that, you have to ‘return’ and ‘check them out again’ if you want to continue reading. With my particular reading habits, that’s a hassle and wouldn’t work for me.

But the biggest issue is: they only offer a limited selection. Basically, NONE of the books I’m reading now are available through that system.

I want to be able to read every book I want, no time restriction. And that’s not possible with the current digital library system they offer.

Piracy was, is and remains a service problem, as Gabe Newell of Valve (Steam) once stated. Most people are perfectly content to pay a reasonable price to get access to the things they want. But if you make that impossible, they’ll find other options.

Take anime for example: even if you subscribed to every streaming service out there, you still wouldn’t be able to see everything you wanted. Some things aren’t streamable or sold ANYWHERE, or only on a service that’s actively blocked in your region. Which means there is simply no legal way for you at all to get that content.

Music on the other hand solved that dilemma. You can use Spotify, YT Music, Apple Music or a host of other options. You pay a flat fee and you can listen to pretty much every song you want, as often as you want. Nobody’s pirating MP3’s these days, because nobody needs to. It’s now more convenient to just stream it.

I’d really like to see someone do the same for books. An unlimited digital library that lets you download anything you want for a flat subscription fee. I’d pay 10 bucks a month for that for sure. Because that would make it more convenient than pirating is right now, with a more consistent experience.

I just buy physicals of the reference books I really want and pirate the digitals of anything else that isn’t sold DRM-free. I WILL own what I bought, whether they like it or not.

Welcome! We can definitely still use a few more people, especially if they’re willing to contribute to content.

Well, if by ‘similar priced’ you mean: a very cheap player, it might make sense.

But in 2004, I carried an iPod 4G which had either 20 or 40 gigabytes of storage. You’d need a backpack full of MD’s to match that, even if you put lower quality songs on there. I had my iPod filled with everything from podcasts, audiobooks, complete albums and enough random music to never hear the same song in a month. Absolutely loved that iPod!

Sony made some really sexy devices, but the format itself just came out too late for it to have widespread consumer appeal. MP3 was just way more convenient, and a lot of folks still rocked discmans like myself.

That said: it was actually a very popular format for the media. I was a journalism student 2001-2005 and it was the format we recorded all interviews on. The radio station where I worked at had MD gear, but also used Marantz compactflash recorders, which I personally preferred.

Yeah, I’m pretty much done with Lemmy right now. It’s just getting way too much. The sky is falling every five minutes.