Every time I move home, I understand the appeal of streaming. Books are heavy, records are fragile and boxes of films and games seem to multiply as soon as the movers arrive. In the UAE, where moving between apartments – or countries – is a familiar part of life, a library that fits on a phone is an easy sell.
But any flirtation with going digital-only dissipates when I read the news. Have you heard about Project Panama, for instance? In 2024, Anthropic spent tens of millions of dollars buying second-hand books by the million. Their spines were cut off, the loose pages fed through industrial scanners and the paper recycled once the words were digitised.
That operation is front of mind again this summer as second-hand booksellers in the UK and Ireland report receiving large orders for obscure, scarce and out-of-print titles, sometimes from buyers whose identities are unclear. Some suspect another AI training operation, although no connection has been established, and Anthropic denies targeting rare or antiquarian books. Given what happened with Project Panama, it is easy to understand their concern.
Anthropic could dismantle those books because it owned them. A US judge later ruled that converting the legally purchased copies into digital versions for internal use was legitimate, noting that the company had bought them “fair and square”.
That is not true of many digital purchases. Most of us can press a button marked “buy” without ending up with anything we can fairly call our own. The purchase is often a personal licence that cannot be transferred, resold or inherited.
Sony says newly released PlayStation games will become digital-only from January 2028, while its terms describe digital purchases of games as licences. Films leave streaming services, television soundtracks change when music rights expire and entire libraries remain attached to the companies operating them. Those companies may continue to exist for decades, but they have made no promise to preserve everything we paid to access.
I am hardly a purist. I have plenty of digital purchases, particularly complete runs of old television shows I cannot find on streaming. But even if every licence became permanent tomorrow, I would keep carrying all this stuff around.
I often open Netflix with no film in mind and settle on whatever has just been added. Spotify finishes one record and moves immediately into something else. Hours can pass with things I never quite chose and barely remember afterwards. That is the passive consumption I find troubling.
When I was younger, becoming interested in something – German cinema of the 1930s, for example – meant tracking it down at a library or video shop. Finding one film exposed me to several others, and the search could continue for weeks. It was slower, less convenient and occasionally frustrating, but the interest had room to deepen.
Physical copies do not guarantee that kind of attention; my unread shelves prove that. They do, however, keep the decision in front of me. Choosing a book, record or disc gives it a place in the room and another chance to draw me back.
A book spends far more time closed than open. Even then, it has not vanished. It sits beside the bed, travels in a bag and catches the eye from across the room. A title saved on an app can disappear into a list; an unread book remains in the room.
Unread books are often treated as evidence of failure. Italian philosopher Umberto Eco regarded his vast library as a record of everything left to discover, an idea Lebanese-American professor and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb later called the “anti-library”.
I think of mine more simply as a collection of possibilities. Some books are there because I know I will need them; others because I was curious enough to leave a door open. Research into shelf-browsing supports that instinct: visible books are selected more often and can lead readers towards subjects they never intended to explore.
A 2019 study published in Social Science Research analysed data from about 160,000 adults across 31 societies. Those raised with home libraries tended to develop stronger literacy, numeracy and digital problem-solving skills – even after parental education, their own education and occupation, and current reading habits were taken into account. The study cannot prove that the books caused those differences, but it suggests that growing up in a home where reading is visible and readily available has effects that can last well into adulthood.
Part of who I am comes from growing up in a house packed to the rafters with books, films and records. My grandfather was an autodidact who passed that appetite on to me, quizzing me about historical figures and guiding me through deep dives into 19th-century ghost stories, Italian horror films and big-band jazz. That mixture lit up my curiosity, taught me to see connections across history and culture, and left me with a voracious need to keep learning.
My own shelves now contain old obsessions, abandoned interests and earlier versions of myself. Notes in the margin preserve arguments I was having with myself years ago, while inscriptions or old bookmarks recall who gave me a book and where I was when it arrived. The unread volumes belong there too. They show where my curiosity has reached, even when my reading has not caught up.
A vinyl record, meanwhile, asks for a different kind of attention than a streamed song. Taking it from its sleeve, lowering the needle and turning it over after one side gives the music a place in the room. Researchers studying vinyl culture have connected its appeal to that mixture of ritual, artwork and physical involvement. It cannot guarantee close listening, although it makes disappearing into another app slightly more difficult.
Putting on a Blu-ray can feel like making an appointment with a film. Opening a streaming service often means deciding to watch something before deciding what – or even whether – I particularly want to see. When everything is immediately available, each work can start to feel replaceable.
Physical media has its own limits. It costs money, occupies space and sometimes deteriorates. Players become obsolete, discs are damaged and many modern games require downloads or functioning servers despite arriving in a box.
But a physical copy can be lent, sold, donated or inherited. It preserves a particular cut, soundtrack, set of liner notes or translation, while the marks accumulated over time become part of its history. Copies spread across thousands of homes also give a work more chances of surviving after a company decides it no longer belongs in its catalogue.
And collector culture, as seen on display in Abu Dhabi at Playgrounds on the weekend, can also build community.
Every move forces me to decide which parts of that history are worth carrying into my next home. Some of the things on my shelves belonged to my late grandfather. Along with the work itself, I inherited the knowledge that he had chosen it, lived with it and eventually decided it should become mine. A subscription might have given us access to the same work, but it could never have carried his copy to me.
