While there are still hundreds of CD players available more and more people have digital music, even if, like me, they buy a CD then rip the tracks onto a computer.  Having all, or a large portion of your music collection in your hand isn’t a new idea but recent advances have made accessing it so much more than just plugging in headphones.

No more sitting intimately close to your CD player, having to remember not to move too far for fear of yanking your equipment off the shelf or your ears off your head; no more long extension leads trailing across your living room ready to trip up your unsuspecting nearest and dearest.  No, now technologies like Airplay, DLNA and Bluetooth enable quick and simple wireless connections between phones, PCs and speakers and Near Field Communication technology lets phones like recent Sony and Samsung models connect to an output device or share a playlist with a simple tap.

Add into this phone and tablet apps that can remotely stream from or control a computer, or a dedicated media streamer and you can access your whole library of digital music and films at the touch of a screen, through your hi-fi or TV.

The device I use can also form the basis of a portable, rechargeable Bluetooth speaker that only cost me in total £20.  The receiver pictured above automatically pairs with my phone when I switch the Bluetooth on and I can play music either on the portable speakers or on either of my CD players or car stereo via the aux inputs.  The most impressive thing though is being able to pair it with my laptop, set up a remote control of either VLC media player or Windows Media Player via WiFi from my phone and play music from my collection via Bluetooth back to my hi-fi in the living room.  It may not be as seamless as Airplay but considering the variety of hardware it still “just works” and the sound quality is fantastic despite the music being beamed here, there and everywhere before hitting my ears.

I have a book on my desk, The Consolations of Philosophy, it cost me £3.49 from the Oxfam bookstore, on Amazon it’s £7.36 paperback or £8.99 in the Kindle edition.  So it costs more to have it digitally sent to the Kindle app on my tablet than to have it sent through the post.

I’ve often said that I prefer paper books and for that matter CDs and DVDs because of the sense of ownership, having a physical object in my possession but a recent problem encountered by a Kindle owner illustrates how with digital media the issue of “ownership” is less clearcut.

We’ve known for years that computer software is not owned but licensed and that when you buy a book you’re only buying the medium not the content but as the story outlined by Gizmodo shows an online book or music store can, as per their terms and conditions, remove your access to what you have paid to use and the term “buy” is not strictly accurate as you already own the medium (the Kindle, Nook etc).

Recently a Norwegian woman was, for unexplained reasons, locked out of her Amazon account and as her Kindle had broken she could not reload the books she’d paid for onto a new device, it was however eventually resolved following coverage on various websites.  Amazon said that if a user’s account is closed then they still have access to the books on a device, but it appears that if you change devices you wave bye bye to “your” content.  So it’s not really “yours” at all.  Imagine if you opened up a novel you were half-way through and it had turned into an unlined notebook.  Apart from having the opportunity to write your own ending you’d be a bit miffed.

Of course you could say, as the music industry has done for years, that this prevents illegal copying, that if you lost or damaged a physical book you’d have to buy a new one, and occurrences like this are rare anyway but it highlights a question that needs answering, the industry needs to either enable access to content you’ve paid for regardless of whether you or they have closed an account and promise not to arbitrarily remove content or say up-front that what you’re getting is little more than a long-term hire agreement.

[Gizmodo UK]