This is one of the biggest downsides of the digital age, the lack of tangible property. It's all just binary data, and when you purchase it you're not purchasing an "it" at all, but rather a license to use the data. Sure, it's very convenient, you can acquire a book or a song or a movie almost instantly and not have to lug around a printed version. But what if it kills off the industries that have heretofore made physical registrations of information? Already we've seen the film camera nearly eliminated from the market. That makes me apprehensive. In a film camera you capture a photograph by the chemical changes the light makes on the film. As long as that film is kept physically secure, the information it captured is secure too. It's tangible. Not just that, but the information is captured directly, it's not dependent on some algorithm deciding how to convert it into digital form (and more importantly, how to convert it back). The film camera versus the digital camera exemplifies the overall problem with information being stored in a dense, digital form versus a physical registration that is directly analogous (hence, analog) to the information itself. Imagine you took a photograph that contains critically important information. You could have a film negative of it, or a flash card containing it in digital form. Under primitive or emergency conditions, which would be more useful? Which could be more easily reversed back to the original information?
I'm no luddite, but I do have apprehension about everything being put into an information-dense format that not only requires a minimum amount of technical resources to access, but furthermore requires "permission" in the form of a license, a key, etc. It means somebody is the gatekeeper of that information, and that somebody will always end up being the government. It's a system that lends itself entirely too well to being disabled at the pleasure of the state.
