A fine union

Physical and virtual worlds are colliding - and converging - in our increasingly digitalised world. We like physical things - we treasure our books, frame our pictures, collect CDs and DVDs and even keep bills and other documents. I like the ‘feel’ of a book, I admire good artwork on Blu-Ray covers and discs and I like to go through old photographs. That is human nature.

But let’s face it - we are running out of space for physical things. I have three full-height bookcases and badly need space for some more books purchased this year. My collection of DVDs and Blu-rays also take up a fair amount of space.

Thanks to technologies available today, we do not need all that space to store things such as books, photos and videos. My Kindle e-reader can store more than 3,000 books (and a few audiobooks). In fact, it can very easily store my entire physical book library and then some. My iPad can store a large number of books, photos and even a few movies. I don’t have a smart-phone yet, but they too can store a large number of files.

Fashionable

If that is not enough, you can store all your things in the ‘cloud’, the fashionable new name for virtual storage of everything from documents to movies. I regularly store my documents on services such as Sky Drive or Google Drive, which gives me the option of accessing my files from anywhere in the world, as long as I have an Internet connection. All my Kindle books, my Appstore Apps and my music purchases are also stored in the cloud - I can stream/download them whenever I wish.

But what if you want the best of both of worlds? In other words, you want the physical article as well as its virtual (digital) counterpart. Amazon, the world’s leading online physical and e-book retailer, last week unveiled just such a service for books. Called Matchbook, it will find Kindle e-book equivalents of your physical books for US$ 3, 2, 1 or free. Only 70,000 books are currently available (Amazon has millions of physical and digital titles in stock) but the service will expand rapidly. Just imagine the convenience - if you cannot take the physical book on your holiday due to space and weight constraints, just take the e-book.

Print purchases all the way back to 1995-when Amazon first opened its online bookstore-will qualify once a publisher enrolls a title in Kindle MatchBook.

Moreover, these e-books have features that print books can never match such as Whispersync (Open the book on your Kindle at exactly the page you ended it on your iPad, for example), X-Ray (more information about characters) and even full integration with the audiobook equivalent where the audiobook will take off from the very place you left the e-book.

Matchbook is not a new idea per se. Publisher O’ Reilley has been bundling multi-format (PDF, ePub, Mobi) e-book files with its physical books for some time. Now that the concept has gone mass market, other publishers should follow suit. What if every book sold anywhere on the planet came with a dose of DLC (Down Loadable Content) in multiple formats for PC/Mac and all popular e-readers such as Kindle, Kobo and Nook? For years, dictionaries, study guides and textbooks have included CD-ROMs which duplicate the entire print text and provide additional material.

The matchbook concept takes it one step further to a completely online platform. Publishers can perhaps provide a free access code in the dust jacket of the printed book itself for the DLC. This will no doubt prove to be very popular - people like value added goods. After all, US$ 3 is not bad, but ‘free’ is great.

Purchase

Ironically, the music industry has been way ahead of the publishing industry when it comes to the marriage of physical and virtual worlds. Many music labels already include MP3 and higher quality FLAC files along with their CDs and Vinyls, either on the CD/SACD itself (embedding digital files is naturally not possible on vinyl) or as a DLC. Amazon has Autorip, the Matchbook equivalent of music discs, where a MP3 file is made available free to those purchase the physical disc. Most video-game publishers also provide additional content via DLC codes.

The most promising use of pairing the digital and physical worlds is in the home video industry, which has already introduced a service called Ultraviolet which enables you to stream your movies to any device. Buying a physical copy (Blu-ray or DVD) gives you access to the service. Most Blu-ray packs also include a so-called Digital Copy which too can be transferred digitally to a variety of devices (including iPads and PCs) for enjoyment virtually anywhere. This way, buyers of physical copies get a good deal - they get a virtual copy which can be accessed anywhere from a variety of devices.

The only constraint at this point of time is the lack of sufficient broadband capacity even in developed countries - a 50 GB Blu-ray quality file will take ages to download. However, as Internet infrastructure gets developed, download times will decrease.

That raises the vital question - whether physical books, magazines, newspapers, music discs and movie discs will disappear in a few decades. There has been massive shift towards buying music online in the past 15 years and services such as Netflix make it easy to watch movies online. On the other hand, there are those who (like me) want to have physical copies of music and movie discs which still offer far more additional content than the online counterparts. For example, multiple surround soundtracks can only be found on a Blu-ray disc.

The story is a little different in the case of books. They have been with us for 500 years and they may survive for some more time to come. A printed book is the ultimate ‘feel good’ object. Nothing comes close to that unique sense of enjoyment when you flip a page, to discover what is there on the next page. But it is comforting to know that an electronic equivalent is available in case you do not want to carry that load around. However, in the end what matters is the act of reading. Physical or digital, books will continue to take us to places where no man has ever gone before.