Selling my DVDs

Around 2000 or 2001, I decided that owning CDs was pointless and sold them all on Ebay. I no longer own any audio CDs and have kept my collection in digital form ever since then. I’ve moved from an mp3 CD player in my car, to an mp3 discman, a few miscellaneous handheld mp3 players and finally to my 30 gig Ipod. I think it was a pretty good call since audio CDs are pretty much dead for a lot of people. And I think DVDs are going the same way. To be replaced by Blu-ray or HD DVD? Nah, screw those formats too. DVDs in all forms are on the way out. They’ll all disappear much quicker than VHS did. That’s my prediction and I’m sticking to it.

With the cable companies offering more and more on demand every day, actually owning your movies is becoming pointless. Why spend $15.00 to own one when you can see it on demand? Getting an account on Netflix for $5.00/month makes owning DVDs stupid. Even McDonald’s is renting DVDs for $1.00/night now. Competition like this will force Blockbuster to keep lowering their rental prices. The networks are starting to let people watch/download their primetime TV shows online for free. Doesn’t Netflix even let you watch your rentals online now? Not to mention the ease in which anyone can download any of this stuff for free on bittorrent.

But the one thing that really sold me on ridding myself of DVDs is my Xbox 360. It lets me mp4ize my entire video collection and watch it all from the TV. I hooked a 500 gig external hard drive to it, which fits everything I own onto it. A few clicks of the remote plays any of it. And it’s easy enough for the kids to use too. I love that thing. And since Ipods also play the mpeg-4 format, I can easily transfer any of it to my Ipod for vacations. Apple TV does the same thing if you want to be more legit about buying online movies to watch on TV, even though the files are locked down and it’s a little pricey now. But the prices will come down and the DRM will disappear and/or become reasonable eventually.

Anyway, now that I’ve slammed the DVD format for 3 paragraphs, I expect everyone to visit my Amazon store page to buy the DVDs I’m selling. Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/shops/index.html/104-8363450-8480721?ie=UTF8&sellerID=A3EFPXZUK73XP2

There’s only 45 up right now, but by the time I finish entering the rest of them there should be over 100 of them. There’s some good stuff up there, if you’re into those old, antiquated DVD things.

Speaking of that, Amazon has a really nice system for selling things. There are no up front costs like Ebay has. And the total time to list each item is just a minute or two.

NEXT MORNING EDIT: Woo, Finding Nemo sold! That’s like $2.00 I made! I need to go buy a bunch of DVD shipping envelopes today. I put my two school books up from last year too. The one I paid about $90 for last year is going to sell for $30 and the one I paid about $40 for I’ll be lucky if I get $5.00 for it. I only kept the books because I hoped they might be used again this year for a similar class. But no. I tried to sell the $90 book back to the book store the other day and they offered me $15. I told them I’d just sell it on Amazon. I thought I’d get a little more than $30 for it though. Never buy books from the student book store again.

My desktop computer rips DVDs in about 2 hours and my laptop rips them in usually under an hour. It’ll probably take a few weeks, but I plan to rip them all. I need more computers.