DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I saw an eye-catching book in the secondhand bookstore the other day: how to de-junk your life, an instruction manual for reducing the clutter in one’s home.

I have clutter. My clutter has been documented before. I regularly add to my clutter. I even have an affinity for it.

According to author and self-styled storage expert Dawna Walter, one way to reduce clutter is to throw away all one’s compact disks. It’s an intriguing idea, which I’ll deconstruct because it is outrageously, staggeringly, spectacularly dumb. Let’s take a look. She writes:

Use technology to help in your conquest of space. CD writers enable you to download your CD collection to the hard drive of your computer and access your collection whenever you need it. Once you have downloaded, you can recycle your CDs or sell them through secondhand shops. This would enable you to limit the selection you have on display to your current favorites. The initial investment would more than pay for itself by freeing up space throughout your home.

I’ll start with the obvious: CD writers are not required for ripping CDs. It’s a minor point, but tends to indicate that neither Walter nor her editors have any idea what technology can do.

Nearly as obvious: what Walter suggests is illegal. The RIAA is making headlines by suing people who share music online. How does she think they’ll react to people who copy CDs and sell the originals?

Her suggestion to recycle CDs is lame. There is no reason to destroy functional CDs, except maybe when they have the AOL logo on the face. Anything that still works, that still serves a purpose, should be sold or donated; if you put in in a landfill, someone else will just make another one.

Walter doesn’t explore the idea that CDs are portable, whereas home computers generally are not. The nice thing about a CD is that it can be carried from the living room to the kitchen to the car, and played in any of those places.

The irony of all this is that there is a way technology can be used to reduce CD clutter: make MP3s of your favorite songs, and connect a computer or MP3 player to all your stereos. Or wear an iPod everywhere. Then, box up all your CDs and store them somewhere safe, so you can re-rip your favorite songs when CPUs get faster and encoding algorithms get better. I admit this approach is beyond the reach of most people, who already own CD players and who don’t own whole-house stereos with MP3 capability. But it has these advantages over Walter’s misguided idea: it’s legal, and it’s free.

Which brings us to the reason I’d found this book in the used bookstore… clearly, the original owner realized that an important step in clearing the junk out of his or her life was to dump this absurd book.