DVD, CD, Game or Book?

Every year, at around this time of year, my immediate family ask me for 'The List'.

Over many long and challenging years, the difficult process of trying to find Birthday and Christmas gifts for me has evolved into a condensed form where I supply a list of things I'd be delighted to receive. This avoids any problems with sincerity after receiving after-shave, socks, small furry animals, gift tokens or, most unimaginatively of all: money.

The List has only a few sections, whittled down over time. These are:

• DVDs, of which I already have too many to watch, but I always assure myself that I will find the time to watch someday.
  
  
• CDs, which I consume when walking to work (and have run out of podcasts to listen to). Unlike DVDs, I don't think that you can have too much music. I have lots of CDs - the music business has done very well out of me over the years, which is why I'm confused that they want to punish me with DRM and other nasties that actively prevent me from listening to, and enjoying, music.
  
  
• Games, by which I mean video games. Games overtook movies as the major entertainment money-spinner some years ago, and I've been hooked since I first landed a lunar module on the Moon back at Liverpool University back in the 1970s.
  
  
• Books, which fight for the closing moments of each day before I go to sleep. I'd like to read more books, but there isn't enough time. I've tried audiobooks, and they are almost right, but not quite. Podcasts still hit the spot that audiobooks just fail to hit.

Of all of these, whilst I treasure them all, the books are the best. Perhaps it is because I know some of the effort that goes into them because I've done one, but this is a weak argument that I can see the flaws in as soon as I type it.

So here's my second try.

Of all of these, whilst I treasure them all, the books are the best. This is because I know that books will, with care, still be just as accessible and readable in twenty or thirty years time, and probably long beyond that. For the rest, then things are more uncertain. Optical disc technology was claimed to have a life of about twenty years, and some of my CDs from the mid 1980s are beginning to show their age. So I'm expecting the error rates to rise, and the technology to play them to vanish, over the next twenty years. But the books will survive!