A couple of months ago, I boxed up my CD collection and moved it out of my flat; the realisation that big pile of plastic in my back bedroom had essentially been transformed from the physical space that my music collection occupied into a large piece of furniture as the MP3 collection on my computers' hard drive had effectively replaced it, combined with the new arrival in a couple of months meant that it was something that had to be done.

In a kind of similar way, I used to hoard magazines when I was younger. Last weekend, I realised that about 2 years worth of FHM from around a decade ago were still stacked up in my parents garage. It was kind of embarrassing to realise that I hadn't really thought through the consequences of the decision I must have made several years ago to not throw them out, but to keep them in storage. (Why? Were they likely to become collectibles that I could sell on eBay for a small fortune?)

The thing is, my behavior hasn't really changed- yet. I still do the same things- CD is still my preferred format for buying music. I rarely buy magazines any more- but occasionally I still do. But, the cover price just doesn't justify the content for me; when so much "stuff" is available online, unless I've got a couple of hours to kill on a train or plane, it just doesn't usually make sense to me to buy a magazine.

Usually.

The exception to that rule is Wired. For the last year or so, it's the only magazine I can actually recollect looking for and buying. In fact, the only reason I occasionally miss an issue is because its a US publication, not always easy to find in the UK, and I've never got around to taking out a subscription. But this month, "Wired UK" was launched.

I was actually a bit worried about it when I heard; I figured that a smaller UK market, already saturated with PC, "Lifestyle", technology and gadget mags would lead to a dumbing-down of the magazine, turning it into another FHM/Stuff kind of read. If that happened, it would also make it much harder to get my hands on the magazine that I actually enjoy reading.

It wouldn't be the end of my relationship with the Wired brand though; after all, I already follow the articles via the RSS feed; I can read most of the articles online. But it's got me thinking about why it's the magazine itself that I like; partly, its the fact that I can shut myself off for an hour or two and read through it. Partly because I spend more than enough of my time reading text on a backlit PC, laptop or iPhone screen as it is, and at the end of the day, I would rather read off paper than a screen.

But mainly it's because it is a quality magazine; the weight of the paper, the consistent and familiar design of the front section along with the unique layout of the longer articles mirrors the quality of the writing. In short, I feel that I get my money's worth because I'm getting something more than what I get for free online- definitely enough to justify the cover price. If I'm paying for a printed version of something that I can get online, then I want a version that's worth paying for— a premium version. Which means that the "extra" stuff— the shiny pages, the binding and cover, the page layout and design— has to be premium. Otherwise, its like buying cheap caviar, an £8 bottle of champagne, or buying a portable TV to watch high definition films on— if what you're getting goes against the grain of why you're getting it then there's probably little point in getting it, and the reason you're buying a printed magazine like Wired is precisely because of the "premium" nature that it has over online content. Even if— and this is a point that I think the publishing industry is struggling to get to grips with— the actual content is the same.

In other words, I read it for the content, but I buy it for the container.

Ultimately, that's the difference between a magazine and a newspaper, between watching a film at the cinema, buying the DVD and watching it on TV, or between downloading an MP3 from a filesharing network and buying the same music (although the difference there is more subtle, but there is a reason that an album that you can legally and freely copy and share was also the best selling MP3 album on Amazon.)

So I was very happy to discover that my fears about a sub-par UK version of Wired magazine were unfounded; it's crammed full of interesting stories, many of which are very UK-specific (such as the cover story about the man who led the iPlayer project for the BBC), and is carrying premium advertising to match.

However, there are a couple of smaller questions that the UK edition raises for me, mainly revolving around whether the US version is still worth reading.

The last US edition I read (which I picked up in New York, so I'm not sure if it was the last issue that wouldnt have been shipped over to the UK), which had a great cover article about the energy industry, and the problems it faces in updating/upgrading the technology of the generation of electricity, the grid that is responsible for the distribution, and the economics of the various businesses and regions involved in the US. Now, this article would be interesting to a UK audience, but not necessarily relevant for a UK magazine. Would this kind of article be rewritten for the UK with additional information about the electricity grid over here, the various companies involved and the consequences of the privatization of the industry? If so, would it come as well as, or at the expense of the US-centric information? Sometimes articles like the one about the Comcast CEO aren't particularly relevant at all to a UK audience (in the same way that the iPlayer piece would be irrelevant to a US audience), but how articles like the one about the energy industry would be 'translated' is something I'm less certain about.

The other down side is that I'm now gathering a collection that could end up being another big, heavy waste of space in my flat as it transforms from "magazine I'm in the middle of reading", to "magazine I've read, but with a few articles I want to read again", to another collection of a medium that (like my CDs and my small FHM library) I will one day realise has transformed from a collection of media into a large piece of not-particularly-attractive furniture that's cluttering up the room.

But perhaps this is actually a less obvious example of the benefits of the magazine existing both off and online- I don't lose anything anymore when I throw the old issues out because by the time I've lost interest in the paper, design and reading experience, I'm not losing the chance to go back and read the content that I'm still interested in if I throw away the paper that contains it. In fact, it's actually easier for me to find an article online than by rifling through old issues to find the right one, before flicking througg to find the page that I'm looking for. The fact that I still won't toss it out as soon as I've read through it once makes it more "permanent" and attractive to buy than a newspaper (I know that it will live in my bag for a week or two at the very least, as opposed to a paper that I've lost interest in long before the end of the day), but at the same time the fact that I know that the physical medium is "disposable" actually makes it more attractive to me.

Which means that there is only one medium that I'm left with that still takes up shelf space in my home; books. And despite the advances in eBooks and e-readers, I can't see a time when that will change.

Unlike a newspaper or magazine, books don't age in the same way. A newspaper from last week, or a magazine from six months ago has a very different value to one on the newsagent's shelves today. But a book that was published ten years ago is often just as valuable as one published today. (By "valuable", I'm not talking about the cost or cover price, but the value to me of having those words on those pages on my shelf or carried around in my bag.)

If I read a book, I probably won't want to re-read it in an electronic form. I probably won't want to refer to just a particular chapter in six months time, with little or no regard to it's context in the larger work. I won't want to skip past the first few dozen pages of news and adverts to get to the "meat", or start with the more frivolous parts at the back, working backwards to see if there's anything I didn't get to when I read it before. I'll want to read it from start to finish.

That's not to say I won't be interested at all in an electronic form- if it's all that's available to me then I'll be perfectly happy to read that instead. (As I realized when half way through Cory Doctorow's "Content", and realized that I could read it online even though I'd left my physical copy at home.)

Obviously, this applies more strongly to novels than some other books- the "long form" continuous narrative is what makes them different to a reference book, where an individual chapter may well be the only interesting part at a given moment in time (not just because that's the chapter I'm up to, but because it covers a subject I want/need to know about.) However, a reference book will still tend to cross-reference between chapters, so while you might only be interested in, say, a recipe for Blueberry Muffins in Chapter 12 of a recipe book, you might need to refer to Chapter One's conversions between ounces and kilograms, Chapter Three's information about how to make icing, or something in Chapter Seven about how to make buttermilk.

But, as Nicholas Carr observes, when those references can point to something else, something outside of the binding of the book itself— say, a Wiki page about icing, or an online weights and measures conversion tool— then it also opens up to all of the clutter of the internet; every piece of online infomation in the whole wide world. And this changes the fundamental nature of the book as a self-contained work, where everything that matters sits within its binding and pages.

So— counter-intuitive as it might seem— a shelf full of books doesn't necessarily represent the "clutter" that it might appear to be from an interior design perspective. Instead, it represents closed-off moments, immersed in a single, linear narrative that simply won't be the same once those words are digitised and uploaded into an iPhone, Kindle or some other device that has a screen you can read off and a connection to the world wide web.

Because, as Dave Gorman discovered quite early on in his Googlewhack adventure, the clutter of everything in the whole wide world can actually be pretty distracting. Sometimes, that's a great thing to have- if I'm reading the news or researching something, I want control of the information I'm reading before I want to find editorial to shape my interpretation. But other times- like when I've got an hour or two free to switch off and relax with a good book- it's good to have an "off" switch on the outside world as well.