The Great DVD Sale of 2019

Earlier this year I learned that my friend Scott, a fellow movie aficionado, no longer owned any DVDs. His movies are either digital copies stored locally, or streamed from online services. I was really shocked by this revelation. “Isn’t that weird?” I said to several of my other friends, only to learn that they too also parted with their personal DVD collections (some of them several years ago). The more people I asked, the more I began to realize that I seemed to be the only one hanging on to DVDs.

Last night, my friend Jeff told me the last DVD he bought was the Lord of the Rings box set, back in 2014. I bought four DVDs last Friday — all used, from Goodwill. I got my first DVD player in 1999, and fell in love with the bonus features that appeared on many discs. I had a CRT television in my living room until 2009 so the clarity that came with DVD wasn’t a big selling point for me, but all those interviews, featurettes, and (especially) commentary tracks hooked me. Bonus features were what convinced me to buy movies I already owned on VHS, and that’s what keeps me buying DVDs today. Back then, I would pay $20 or more to unlock new information behind my favorite films. Today, Goodwill sells movies for $2, and I frequently find them priced for a dollar at garage sales.

Despite the fact that I still buy DVDs, it’s been at least a decade since I actually watched a DVD — and by that I mean, inserting a physical DVD into a DVD player and watching it that way. Every DVD I buy gets “ripped” (converted to a digital file) and copied to my home media server. Most of my televisions and all of our computers, tablets and phones can access the media server. When I come home from Goodwill with a stack of DVDs, I copy each one to my home media server and eventually watch them from there. I don’t have any DVD or Blu-ray players hooked up in our house. I didn’t have any our last house the seven years we lived there, either.

Two houses ago, a large set of shelves in my movie room displayed my DVD collection. In our last house, I stored my DVDs on a set of built-in shelves in the back of an upstairs closet. Again, it’s been a long, long time since I plucked a real DVD off the shelf and put a disc into a DVD player. At some point, all those DVDs simply became pieces of plastic, representing the movies I had stored on my media server.

I should note that to many people, storing movies digitally on a local media server is also considered to be an outdated model. Many people today stream or store all of their movies digitally in the cloud, and store nothing locally. So to them, storing digital movies locally is outdated, and retaining DVDs is downright antiquated.

I’ve contemplated selling my DVDs for some time — so long, in fact, that there’s barely a market for them today. Thrift stores and garage sales aren’t the only places selling them for dirt cheap. My heart sank when I checked Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and found them loaded with DVDs for $1-$2. Some of the same DVDs I own appear to sell for around $5 on eBay, but my hopes were dashed when I did the math and realized that each $5 sale comes with $3.50 in shipping, eBay, and PayPal fees. (Despite that fact, I went ahead and listed five movies for $4.99 each on eBay. It’s been several days and not a single one has sold.) I even checked into a website called Decluttr that will buy your DVDs and cover shipping costs. I entered ten DVDs into their website — they offered me $0.22 each for two of them, and $0.05 for the other eight, for a grand total of 88 cents. I politely passed.

And so it seems either Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist is the way to go — but you can’t sell DVDs without a list of the DVDs you own, and for that, I turned to Libib — a free app that uses your phone’s scanner to scan the bar codes on the back of your movies. The system (which is blazingly fast) recognized the vast majority of my DVDs, and has a method to manually enter the ones it doesn’t have in its database. Libib also automatically generates a website for you based on your collection. All said it took me less than an hour to scan in all the DVDs I’ve found so far, which, according to my list, is 524.

Here’s a link to the page it generated.

As I scanned the DVDs into the system, I felt a pang of sadness as each one moved from the scan pile to the sale pile. Touching them made me want to watch them, even though most of them have been living on my media server digitally for many years. Perhaps the most depressing were the television show box sets — complete seasons of television shows that, in many cases, I never opened. Based on the still affixed price tags, I spent more than a hundred dollars to own every episode of Seinfeld on DVD. Has there ever been a time when Seinfeld episodes weren’t being played on television?

At some point, I had to decide whether I was selling my DVDs for money, or was I selling them because I no longer wanted or needed them. And the answer is… both? I have some innate need in my soul to recoup some of my investment, although logically I realize it will be almost nothing. Getting $2 per movie would be a windfall, it seems. I have box sets that I paid $50 for that sell for $5. At some point, you have to let it go.

Over the next few days I’ll put together an easy-to-read text version of the list and then post the whole lot online. My current plan is to try and sell them for $2/each this month, drop the price to $1/each in October, and donate everything that’s left the weekend after Halloween.

For the first time in many years all my DVDs have been reunited, stacked together on a single shelf. I don’t have the heart to tell them what’s about to happen.