Due to the flexible usage of DVDs and the inflexible usage of Blu-rays, as mentioned in my last post, I kind of wish I had focused on buying DVDs instead. However, maybe half of my Blu-rays include both, but these are strangely unpredictable. For example, I have The Hunger Games on Blu-ray only, but my copy of Catching Fire includes both Blu-ray and DVD.
It occurs to me that the resale value either way is negligible. A $15 movie, resold used, will be lucky to sell for $5, and after the online commission (through, say, Amazon) you might get $3 or $4 from it, which is pretty low pay compared to the effort required to list, sell, and ship it. For this reason I actually wonder if buying used is better, if you’re going to buy at all, since buying used avoids the depreciation almost entirely and can bring the cost per use down quite a bit. The only downside might be that the disk was scratched. In fact, buying used would probably be an advantage over buying full rights to access through a streaming service, since you can never buy used through a streaming service, and the price is usually the same as buying brand new.
Nonetheless, it is also interesting to me that I own quite a number of movies that I “like”, but maybe only watch once every 5 years. How much, then, do I truly like them? Enjoying a movie doesn’t mean you need to own it, and that’s something I and probably most other people don’t think much about. From both a financial and a space perspective, it makes far more sense to only own movies that you watch once every year or maybe two. Whereas having variety was once an understandable reason for owning a library of media, it’s hardly necessary today when you can check movies out from the library for free or rent movies for $4 online.
I love the idea of owning only a handful of movies, and only those that I watch every year or two – nothing more. Whether that can be accomplished remains to be seen, since they are clearly cheaper to own now, the price having already been spent, than they would be to rent if I decide to watch them in the next few years. But this is all speculation, too. If you ditch now and ask questions later, only then you will figure out which movies were really your favorites.
Media is one of those things that is not nearly as expensive for most people as, say, housing and groceries. But goodness, it sure seems to take up a lot of space. You don’t have to turn Amish to know that you can probably trim down these possessions and still have plenty of entertainment.
I also wonder how this applies to books, too. I hate owning books I don’t have a reason to reread. Rereading a book is precisely why you own it. So if you don’t plan to reread it…chuck it. Or resell it. Or whatever.
Although, books also have a very low resale value. A book that is $30 new will scarcely sell for $12 used, and again, after the online sales commission, you might be lucky to get $8 from the deal, not counting the labor you expended in the process. That’s why I don’t try to resell these things: they are almost never worth the hassle.
So then if you buy all your books used, you can almost eliminate the depreciation. In some cases, more-academic books sell about the same price new or used so there is less advantage to buying used, but these cases are much less common. Also, sometimes used books are bent and warped beyond measure, and I have received a few of these over the past 12-14 years, but they are also rare. I’ve found that as long as the book is intact and I don’t have to fight the book to turn pages, only the content actually matters to me, and so if the condition is otherwise poor, so much the better if I finish reading it and decide I don’t care to read it again. I often fall into the trap of thinking that I want my books to be new so that they are “perfect”, and this isn’t necessarily a bad opinion, but it also means that most of my books sit on the shelf in “perfect” condition for no other reason than to look pretty, not because the perfection of the physical object enhances the quality of the content.
Buying used also has another key advantage: it helps you be less attached to your possessions. Buying new tends to trigger the Sunk Cost Fallacy, where you feel you have to keep something because you bought it new and you need to “get your money’s worth” from it. When you buy used for a fraction of the price, it’s much easier to chuck it, since you feel you have less “invested”.
I recently bought a used textbook from 2016 for $10. The newest edition from 2021 costs $150. Which is going to be easier to throw out if I decide the content isn’t as relevant as I had hoped?