Embracing the wired future

In this week's Opus (although, as of this writing, it's still last week's Opus that's linked on the site), Opus is comfortably ensconsed in his anxiety closet with his books, CDs, Spongebob Squarepants telephone, and (I think) a pin-up penguin poster. Steve Jobs comes in and tells him to embrace the wired future, and throws out everything in Opus's closet, including (at the very end) his newspaper and comics. He replaces it with an iPod that has a keyboard and satellite dish attached. Opus is less than enthused.

And I would be, too. Except I wouldn't. I read quite a lot, and we simply won't discuss how much of my salary ends up in the hands of various bookshops. I've tried e-books and don't like them. I want a paperback that I don't mind leaving on a plane, or a nice hardcover that I cna pull off the shelf and just flip through it. But I've switched my SIGPLAN membership to electronic-only, because storing all of the various proceedings for conferences that I didn't attend is just too much. I still buy CDs (another sizeable, and unmentionable, portion of my budget), but I buy individual songs from the iTunes Music Store because I don't want to have to buy the whole album. When I buy a new disc, it goes into my player for a few listens, then I rip it and just let iTunes do its shuffle magic. It's rare that the CD comes off my shelf again. (To be fair, I have a six-disc changer in my car, which got a lot more use when I had a 45-minute commute each way. Now that I've got a 10-minute commute, which will become a bike commute in spring, I don't bother.) I rarely take paper notes anymore. I use the tabbed notebook feature in Word:mac, and have different files for different projects or people or whatever, and create a new tab in the notebook for the notes that I take in a particular meeting. I would remove my landline if my ISP's headless DSL wasn't so much more expensive than basic_phone_service + DSL.

I suppose this means that I'm not as close to Opus as I might have thought I was. I was horrified at the idea of someone taking away my books, CDs, and vinyl, but then I realised that I was reading the comic strip online. Is it really a matter of time before I give up these physical artifacts?