Portable Art/Culture/Great Creative Works

You know now that iPads/Tablets/iPods/Kindles are a thing, I started to realise it's now possible to carry many great works of human achievement with you on a bus or a train due to the magic of digital downloads.

I would argue the following fit into the "Greatest Human Achievements You Can Fit In Your Tote Bag" category:

Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon/The Wall: Both fit in your iPod nicely. I'd try to fit the movie version of The Wall on my iPad if I had one or the time to figure out how to put an MKV file ripped from a DVD onto one of the damn things.

Watchmen: Depending on whether you have a colour ready eTablet device and depending on what app, it IS rather possible to have this masterwork carried around with you in non-paper form easily.

Scarface: You may have had to have bought the Limited Edition Steelbook Blu Ray Combo Pack of this movie to get the Digital Copy, but it is entirely possible to watch this cultural landmark on the train using an iPad. Then again, it's also possible to watch a lot of lesser cinematic achievements on your iPad like Jean Claude Van Damme's Hard Target, but who would complain considering the convenience of having the most awesome twenty minutes of cinema from Scarface available at your fingertips wherever you go?

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare/Franz Kafka's Metamorphoses and Other Stories/Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching/Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas/On The Road/Naked Lunch/various other important works I haven't remembered which are also available as ebooks:

You may think the idea of having a library of humanity's great literary works in your tote bag on a Kindle is laughable, considering the DRM, but you must also consider that the DRM Amazon pitifully tries to inconvenience its customers with is also laughable, and is about as easily defeated as an infant trying to defend its lollipop from being stolen. Calibre is your friend.

Maybe it's just me but I find the concept that we've gotten to the point where a shitload of human culture worth caring about can be fit inside a tiny box like an iPod or an external USB HDD drive for storing files within my lifetime.

Also worth noting is that my external hard drive full of the ebooks I bought and stripped the DRM from after having paid for them was totally worth it considering I can read them on any device now.

I looked at my bookshelf the other day, and it occurred to me that I could fit all of it onto a Tablet.

Still, there's something about paper books that electronics can't replicate. Maybe it's the smell and feel of paper.

God, I sound old.

Nah, nothing wrong with that. I feel the same way.