I’ve been on this project for the past three years that involves getting rid of stuff to free up space. It first started out with selling my comic book collection. I had over 3000 comics in 14 long boxes that took up a lot of (needed) space. If you have never seen long comic book boxes then you should at least know that having 14 of these easily filled up a closet, and then some.
Next, a little over a year ago, I finished transferring all my CDs to my computer hard drive (with backups, of course). I had already been in the process of doing this for the past 10 years. Every time I bought a new CD I would transfer it to my computer so that I could listen to my music without having to grab a CD and inserting it into my CD-ROM. Well, since buying a iPod about three years ago and using it in my vehicle, I realized thereafter that I never touched any of my CDs, they were just taking up space and collecting dust. So I finished transferring the rest of my collection to my computer last year, boxed up all my CDs and went to the local buy/trade CD store and sold my collection for a decent amount. Problem solved. A 300 plus CD collection was no longer taking up space. Now, when I want music I just go to the MP3 download section of Amazon, buy and download the files straight to my music library on my computer.
And now my next two task is getting rid of all my books and DVDs. I have a pretty hefty book collection and easily over 250 DVDs. I had already started stacking books I have read that I know I will never read again to sell either on Amazon or at my next yard sale but I decided yesterday that I should just donate them since there is no telling how long it will take me sell them; they’ve already been sitting in a stack on the floor for the past couple of months collecting dust, I need the space. All the other books that I have not read I may attempt to sell on Amazon. One thing I failed to realize is that there is a such thing as a library. I haven’t been to a library in over 15 years but there is one near my house that I can visit anytime I want to read a book; I’ll let them store the books for me. As far as my DVD collection’s future, I figure I will try to sell them on Amazon or to friends and family (my collection is on the right if you are interested in buying). I’ve spent far too much money on them to just donate them.
With movies and music, the rise of online digital media has become so easily available there is really no need for physical ownership any longer; I honestly believe this is the future. Slowly, it is becoming the same for books. Services like Netflix and Amazon Unbox for movies, iTunes and Amazon for music download, and now Amazon’s Kindle, along with other electronic book readers, are so much easier to access these days with the increase of internet bandwidth (I’m clocking 30Mbps down and 1.8Mps up now). The only thing I need to worry about is hard drive storage and backup. But, with the price of hard drives so affordable these days there are no worries there.
Hopefully, within the next year or so, the only thing in my bedroom will be my bed, my TV, my desk and computer surrounded by hard drives with all my media in digital format.