Trying to decide what to do with the many DVDs in my possession has resulted in an odd dilemma. What do I do with all of them once I’ve watched them? Of course, everyone has “keepers” that they would never get rid of. It’s not the obvious keepers that are causing me pause – it’s the ones that fall into the gray zones between “I’ll watch it again” and “it’s just gonna sit there and collect dust but I might want to watch it again someday” that I’m talking about. This issue seems to come up a lot (see my recent dilemma over what to do with my copy of The Tudors) and it even affects simple things like managing what little space I have available to house all of my accumulated treasures! The answer is to swap them at SwapaDVD, but the question of when and which ones to swap remains the same.
I think I’ve decided to keep the items that I can’t readily replace – even if there’s little possibility that I’ll watch them again any time soon. While I’ve been very lucky to pick up a number of out of print DVDs at SwapaDVD, I don’t kid myself that lightening would strike twice and that I’d be able to get the same titles again very readily. First, because there are other collectors who have the same titles on their wish lists and I’ll be forced to wait in line to get a replacement (that’s fair). Second, because these titles are out of print, they often command stupid-expensive pricing on the secondary used market (as a buyer I call the high prices stupid, if I were the seller I’d call it fair market value)!
I watch a lot of non-fiction. Documentaries, biographies, performance art, you name it – I watch it. A lot of this sort of thing is only produced in small numbers – it’s never expected to appeal to the masses so their production runs tend to be quite small. Some houses, such as A&E/History Channel only issues certain titles based on demand. This is literally a print-on-demand scenario where they will tell you up front that your order will take longer to fill because they physically have to manufacture the DVD to fill your order. If you were to go their website, a great many of their titles are noted this way. Of course, you’re usually forced to pay the full price of $25 for these titles, unless they decide to run a special and produce a bunch of them in advance. They did this recently with their Modern Marvels series and offered them as a BOGO free deal.
