Digital Gifts - What's Missing?

My Christmas wish list this year, as most years, comprised largely books and DVDs. The family gets cross with me about this as sometimes they wish I'd ask for something else but the reality is I want for nothing and I love good books and the odd TV boxed set. So here are two things that were on my Christmas list:

• the Hyperion Omnibus, Dan Simmons, preferably on my eReader please as it's 784 pages long and I could do without the weight;
• series 1 of Babylon 5 on DVD - I have the others, I just need series 1 which I can't justify buying for myself as I have the VHS tapes.

I'm enjoying the Babylon 5 DVDs… I don't have the Dan Simmons.

Why?

Because you can buy and wrap up a DVD but it seems that you cannot buy and give someone a specific eBook (or, for that matter, a downloaded music track, film or whatever).

Of course you can buy someone a gift certificate — the electronic equivalent of a book token, but that's not the same thing at all. A token gives the recipient the guilt-free pleasure of choosing and buying something digital that might be a tad indulgent. That's good - but wouldn't it be nice to receive a book/film/album that someone has chosen for you? Or that you asked for?

And isn't is nicer to give someone the specific thing they asked for rather than the means to buy it themselves?

What's missing is the option to give someone something physical that represents the fact that next time they switch on their eReader, MP3 player, tablet or whatever, there will be a specific digital product available to them for download.

Another line of thought. I belong to a book group in which those of us with eReaders now form the majority. It's noticeable that when we discuss a book, those who had the physical printed object knew more about the book than those of us who just had the electronic version. Why? Because we didn't have the dust jacket with all the blurb — if you like, the metadata was missing.

For those of us old enough to remember: when CDs replaced vinyl there was a lot of angst about the fact that the much smaller packaging meant that there was far less scope for artwork. This is self evidently true in my opinion. Many classic album covers are recognised as significant pieces of art in their own right. As an example, the CD case for the Velvet Underground and Nico's album in no way replaces the original gatefold sleeve complete with peelable banana skin (if my brother had kept his copy in pristine condition it would be worth a penny or two by now).

Back in the day, albums would sometimes come in elaborate packaging, would sometimes include lyrics and goodness knows what other information. Todaym as much as ever, publishers put a lot of effort into jacket design and presentation. And it's all completely lost in the digital format.

Now, there is work going on to address this – to create digital packaging, but I believe there is still a benefit to be had in making things like album artwork and book jackets available as physical objects even when they relate to purely digital products.

To get back to where I started, here's my proposal to online retailers of digital content:

1. make it possible to add content to another person's eReader, MP3 player, etc. subject to their approval (to avoid spam);
2. make available some form of the printed material that would go with the physical object (presumably at extra cost);
3. make it easy to put these together, i.e. a customer can buy a digital object, give the date and time when it should be available on a target device, and deliver relevant printed artwork to the paying customer at the time of purchase for them to wrap and give to the recipient.

That way, you never know, you might not lose another a sale and I might just get that Dan Simmons compilation…