A lot depends on how they are handled, of course. The laser player does not touch the surface, so that theoretically they can be played forever. They are vulnerable to scratches, but I understand the error correction is extremely robust, so it might take a heck of a scratch to mess them up. I think they are vulnerable to heat like video tapes. Old laserdiscs sometimes developed seal breaks around the perimeter that allowed the aluminum undercoating to oxidize and deteriorate, but I don't know if DVDs still have this problem.

Obviously, wear and tear from handling would be a much more critical issue for a library than for home use. It would only take one ham-handed jelly-fingered kid to mess up a DVD for the other users.

I'm a little leery about the idea of eventually moving all our stuff over to data disks as well. I can imagine the fall of civilization, and a thousand years later everybody wearing strings of these shiny magic disks around their necks.

Like the free market, a bound paper book always works. Besides, I like reading a book better than reading off a screen. I don't have to worry about batteries, it's easy on the eyes, and in my personal opinion, books smell good.

On the other hand, I am comforted by the fact that irreplacable literature can be duplicated and packed into a tiny space so that almost anyone can get at it. In the original Philip Wylie book "When Worlds Collide," (not the George Pal movie) the spaceships used to evacuate a tiny part of humanity from a doomed Earth were almost literally lined with thousands of books as they tried to save as much of the written heritage of mankind as possible. Today you could fit as many books--not to mention art and other information--into a bag that would fit into an airplane overhead compartment.

* * *

As bandwidth to individual homes increases, it will eventually become possible to "squirt" the contents of a DVD through a data line in much less than the two hour play time. When this happens, pay-per-view movies will be much more flexible than they are now, and people will be able to order anything they want anytime they want.

I wouldn't buy any stock in video stores right now.