James Gleick has a fantastic, thought-provoking editorial in the New York Times about the skyrocketing value of rare physical goods — like a centuries-old Magna Carta — coming on as part of the same phenomena leading to crash in the value of information goods:
Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a "Rembrandt" good enough to fool the eye, the "real" Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.
(via Kottke)
