The article about the “subscription” HP ink made me realise something.
Subscriptions aren’t a new idea at all. You could subscribe to paper magazines. And you got to keep them.
I’m just clearing up my old house and it’s filled with tons of old tech magazines. Lots of useful knowledge here. Wanna know how Windows and Mac compared in 1993? It’s in here. All the forgotten technologies? Old games, old phones, whatever? You’ll find it.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
But still, the very definition of subscription has shifted. Now, the common meaning is “you only get to use these things as long as you’re paying”. Nobody even thinks it could mean anything else.
Besides, it doesn’t only apply to services that offer entire libraries. Online magazines still exist in a similar form as the paper ones. But you only get to access them while your “subscription” is active. Even the stuff you had while you were paying.
BTW I’m not throwing my old magazines away. I won’t have the space, but a friend is taking it all. If they wouldn’t, I’d give them to a library or let someone take them. The online and streaming stuff of today and tomorrow? In 30 years it’ll be gone, forgotten and inaccessible.
To be clear: Your public library almost certainly doesn’t want your 1992 National Geographics. Please be nice to your librarians.
Where I live, they do. (And they distribute donated stuff to libraries that are missing stuff.)
My bad. I stand corrected. Librarians here get so sick of donations we can’t use that there are endless memes on librarian social media groups complaining about people ignoring signs and policy and dumping media they no longer want in or near the library because they can’t be bothered to dispose of it properly. (And they do.) If that’d not a problem in your area, kudos for helping the library. I apologize.