300 DVDs…

My Complete DVD Collection.
(all 302 DVDs! Click to view in detail)
Photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

The first DVD player I bought was a hacked Pionier player. I bought it online for more than a thousands pounds from a dodgy hacker who was able to remove the region limit. To change the region I had to press a combination of keys and then restart and then press another set of keys. The instructions for this routine were xeroxed many times and hardly readable and I lost the instructions after only a few months.

The first DVDs I ordered at Amazon.com were Reservoir Dogs, Heat, Blade Runner - The Director’s Cut, Payback and Starship Troopers. I just looked it up. According to Amazon that order was shipped on january 19, 1999.

Last week someone gave me a box with 10 DVDs which brings me to a total of 302 DVDs. That sounds like an awful lot but it has been 2916 days since I bought my first DVD. That means that on average I bought a new DVD every 9,65563 days. Less than one a week. Sometimes none for a few months and then 10 at once on Amazon.

Sometimes a DVD costs me $20 and sometimes $4 and sometimes I get them for free. But I think that we can assume that on average I paid $7 for each DVD. That means that I paid over $2114 for my whole collection.

This is DVD number 300: Underground

There used to be more DVDs in my collection but I kept losing them to friends who wanted to borrow a few and than forgot about it. I don’t blame them at all. I’m sure I have a few DVDs in my collection that I borrowed and forgot to return. But these days I use the excellent Delicious Library tool from Delicious Monster. You can just type in the title of a movie and the software gets all the information, including the cover, from Amazon. When you lend someone a movie you just select their name from your addressbook and a date from your calendar for when you exect it back. I currently have about 20 DVDs out with friends which are all weeks or even months overdue. But I don’t mind that at all because at least I know where they are and I’m sure I will get them back one day.

Oh, and Delicious Library also lists your books. I have a lot more books than DVDs but I only list the 139 books I bought in the last 3 years in my library. The first book I bought was “The first 20 million is always the hardest” by Po Bronson…

Just stumbled upon this photo of the Amazon.co.uk warehouse: