Last month’s Guardian reported a drastic fall in the price of Elvis memorabilia. As his original fans die off and their collections hit the auction market, there simply aren’t enough new fans desperate to acquire that Jailhouse Rock limited edition.

Is this the fate that awaits our anime collectables 30 years down the line? Will your cherished, unopened, box-new copy of the Zavvi-exclusive Anthem of the Heart fail to monetise for your money-grabbing offspring as they dance on your grave? What is a “collector’s edition”, anyway? It used to carry with it some sense of exclusivity and bragging rights, but in recent years, it has more healthily come to simply connote an anime show worth owning in physical form, rather than trusting to the whims of online content providers. But as an early adopter of DVDs, I have already had to suffer the annoyance of a much-loved disc succumbing to drop-outs and scratches. Manufacturers refuse to guarantee a DVD past five years, although most of them can last for a few decades. But how long do you want to collect your collectable? Will you be watching Akira in your rocking chair, when you can’t read the subtitles anymore?

If that’s the plan, maybe we should get into M-DISCs, Millenniata’s answer to archival data storage. Readable on a standard DVD or Blu-ray player, M-DISCs record their data by physically etching it into a layer of carbon, rendering it far less liable to deterioration and safe for a thousand years. “Your data is engraved in stone – literally,” trills the manufacturer’s website, before immediately conceding that carbon is not actually stone.

The M-DISC might be the great unsung technology of this decade. It’s been commercially available for the last seven years; you can buy them off the spindle for a fiver a throw and many modern disc burners are already compatible with the format. And yet there’s been nary a whisper of it among the anime collectable community. I checked with several movers and shakers while writing this article, and none of them had heard of it. Will M-DISCs be a new fad for fans who want their children’s, children’s children to have access to Ghost in the Shell, or those extra mastering costs seem like too high a price to pay?

“Does this mean,” asks my wife, “that we won’t have to buy a new copy of Toy Story every three months?”

No. M-discs only last a thousand years when they are properly archived… not left on the living room floor for sticky hands to play with.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of Japan. This article first appeared in NEO #165.