I've noticed a bit of this in myself when it comes to books, but the existence of electronic books makes this not too onerous.
I heart the Kindle and similar devices, but ye hairy gods electronic books are overpriced. I understand why new releases are expensive, but I can buy a copy of (to pick an arbitrary example) Catch-22 at any used bookshop for $0.50; why I do I need to pay Amazon $13?
My usual solution to this problem is to buy things in some legal way and then go and get the pirated version anyways for the added convenience (lack of DRM on music, lack of unskippable previews on movies, having all my DS games easily available, etc.). However, that won't work with books if my goal is also to reduce space consumption. :-\
I have a problem with developing attachments to the books, movies, games, and other media that I enjoy. For example, after I finished playing the new Prince of Persia title via rental, I enjoyed it so much that I went out and bought my own copy, even though I knew I would be unlikely to play the game again for at least a year.
This is wasteful in a lot of ways. The media takes up unnecessary space, and makes moving from one place to another more difficult; the last time I moved, easily 3/4 the boxes contained media, primarily books which have especially low information-to-weight and information-to-volume ratios.
More importantly, my magpie habit uses up money, even though there are numerous free or inexpensive long-term rental services like NetFlix, GameFly, and my old favorite the US public library system.
I've decided to get around this by trying to transfer my sense of ownership from the item itself to the memory of the experience of enjoying it. So, I've been writing up reviews of all the games, movies, and books that I own, and also all those that I can remember enjoying in the past even if I don't currently own them. I want this "collection" to feel complete, so that I'm not tempted to go and spend $40 on some old SNES cartridge for the sake of posterity, or to buy any more books that I'm not actually expecting to read often enough or on short notice enough to offset the tiny cost of going down to the library and checking it out when needed.
I've been trying to look around for some computer application or net service that can help me do this, but to my surprise, pickings have been pretty slim! The only one that seems vaguely close is blippr, which exhibits a number of good ideas:
These things are all great, but unfortunately blippr is badly marred by poor responsiveness and a terrible user interface design. It also seems as though development on it has effectively halted for the last year or so, and the source is unfortunately not available for me to contribute improvements myself. I've managed to review a couple hundred items anyways, but it took much longer than it should have, and I'm losing patience with its quirks fairly quickly.
My questions for y'all are: