There’s a reason people have ‘book-shelves’ instead of ‘book-attics’: your books, music and movies are a way to define yourself as a person. But what if you stream everything?

My music lives in Spotify, my movies in Netflix and my books are on my Kindle. That digital life is great: I can enjoy music wherever I am, I can’t lose a book on the train and I can binge for a fixed price per month. Also great is the auto-recommendation of new content.

The downside is I don’t have a feeling of ownership anymore. The experience is very ethereal, I miss holding a physical album or book, as a kind of anchor for the story or music.

When I am at somebody else’s place, I love to browse through their music collection, their books and their DVDs. It tells you a bit about the person and it is a nice conversation-starter.

And now finally, it is also possible with your Spotify-library :) Introducing: The Offline Spotify Collection!

Prototyping time

I printed the six most-listened to albums (thanks last.fm) and added the new ‘scannable’ from Spotify. This is quite a laborious process, since the scannables only show up on a mobile device and can’t be saved directly on an Android phone 😐

I’m still toying with the exact form of this: loose album-covers, a book, a poster…

Here’s how it works:

The offline experience

It’s great to see this idea working so well in practice! Already, it’s easier to discuss which album to put on next!

I also ‘feel’ closer to the albums that I printed. Although that might have something to do with the fact that it took over half an hour per album to make… 🤓

Next up: the offline Kindle library

My next great idea: printing ebooks 😇

Update!

I’ve come up with a different way to implement this, which looks great (IMHO).