The smell of an old hardcover book.
The feel of slightly discolored paperback pages beneath your thumb.
The crackle of the needle dropping on a used vinyl record.
The plasticky click of a CD jewel case snapping shut.
The loop of DVD menu music, that picture wiggle before the VCR tracking adjusts on a VHS...
These are a few of my favorite things.
I don't know about you, but in our increasingly digital, on-demand, streaming-only world, I feel like the novelty of convenience is wearing off.
So, this blog post is my condensed treatise in defense of physical media.
Curating your media treasury
A few years ago, I went through a phase of purging old books, movies, music, video games, and other media from my home. My reasoning was, "I am not my stuff. It's just taking up space. And pretty much everything's available on streaming, so if I ever want to watch it, I don't need to own it anyway."
My, how the pendulum swung.
I now find myself in a collecting phase... and in need more shelves.
A lot of folks I talk to at bookselling events confide that they no longer buy books. They only do Kindle Unlimited (streaming) or borrowing books from the library. And that's great. But I've concluded that I much prefer the experience of having physical media. There's just something about having a solid object you can hold in your hand — and actually own.
When you own a piece of media:
Nobody can ever pull it from their platform and remove your access to it.
Nobody can take it down from their digital store and place it behind a subscription-only paywall.
Nobody can ever remaster or revise it to fit modern sensibilities.
But building a collection of physical media isn't just about owning things. It's about curating your treasury.
Whether it's art, photos, comic books, DVDs, or paperback novels, your curated collection becomes a physical representation of your tastes, your experiences, and what matters to you, your own personal library to share with others, display, and pass down someday.
Look, I'm not telling you to become a hoarder here, but on a rainy October afternoon, there's nothing quite like taking a real thing off a real shelf, wiping off some real dust, and reexperiencing a tangible asset that, at some point, some earlier version of you thought you might like to have.
To me, those dust-scented afternoons are the stuff of life.
Here are some physical media assets that I guarantee can collect dust with the best of 'em:
COREY MCCULLOUGH'S BOOKS ON AMAZON
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