Reaching the digital preference point

It happened sooner than I expected: earlier this week I reached what I'm calling the "digital preference point (DPP)".

I realized, where possible, I now prefer acquring stuff in digital format rather than in physical form. I already had been getting a lot of bills via email and the web rather than by regular mail. And the Amazon Kindle nudged me further in the digital direction--it's great having so many books portable and searchable instead of taking up space in the house.

But I hadn't really made the switch with music. That was mainly because I refused to deal with low quality DRM'ed selections from the online vendors. But that all changed this year with Amazon MP3s and iTunes Plus.

So earlier this week I was browsing the Amazon MP3 store's specials and saw Colbie Caillat's album Coco available for download for $7.99. It caught my eye because I had bookmarked it when my custom Pandora station played it for me a few weeks ago. Coco seems to have a high quality to crap ratio so I was interested in the full album. My normal M.O. at this point had been to buy a used copy of the CD and then rip it and resell it. Used Coco CDs were selling for around $6.50 plus shipping. The Amazon price for the new physical CD matched the download price, $7.99. And with Amazon Prime, shipping is free, making it the same price as the digital download.

But then I really started to think this through. Was it really worth the effort to rip this CD myself, add/fix all the necessary metadata, post a listing on Amazon and Half.com to resell it, then package it, figure out postage, and mail it once it sells? For what, the ability to make back maybe $3 or $4?

And so I purchased the digital album. It came right down to my computer and got added to iTunes automatically. I only had to fix the genre metadata (because Amazon seems to consider just about everything "Pop"). The whole thing took about one minute of my time. If I had purchased the physical CD, it would have easily taken up 15-20 minutes of my time, start to end.

Crossing the DPP makes this stuff feel more like real entertainment instead of work.