CD’s, DVDs, books – what to do when moving abroad
This post may be somewhat generational. The younger you are, the less likely you are to be collecting CDs, DVDs, and books, and the more likely you are watching movies online, storing your music on iTunes and getting your books on Kindle, iPad or another type of e-reader. At my age, I have real rather than virtual bookcases of these items that I no longer want or need now that we are preparing to move abroad. So recently, I spent a couple of evenings loading the CDs I like best onto my iTunes library. There were a handful of CDs that wouldn’t load on that I particularly like, often made by a friend or a small band, so I added those to one of my storage boxes. I will give away or sell the rest of the CDs at a yard sale. I looked into selling them online, but it doesn’t look worth it to me, especially since the CDs I have are not the most popular or latest ones. With the DVDs, I also took a handful of my very favorites and put them in the same storage box, and the rest we will give to our kids, my sister or sell at a yard sale. With everything we can watch online there really isn’t a need to carry DVDs around with us.
That brings us to books. We have a large 24′ X 12′ unfinished room in our basement we use primarily to store my father’s old library, full of chess and literature books, that he collected over his lifetime. We have sold some on Ebay, but many don’t sell, or only bring in a dollar a book, not making it worth the time to list them. We are planning to store some of the chess books to consider to selling at a later date, and give away the rest. I will probably donate my professional books to the staff at the clinic where I work, and we will also give away most of our remaining personal books – maybe selling a few at a yard sale. From now on we will go digital when we buy books. I already went digital on my last trip to Africa, and it was a big relief just to have my Kindle, rather than dealing with the weight of a number of books in my luggage, which I had on the trip before that. The only books I prefer to have a hard copy of are tour guides. I find the digital copies just don’t work for me – I need to flip around in the book and skip sections that don’t apply – in ways that are hard to do on my Kindle. But then again, a lot of the info I can find now on smart phone apps – such as restaurant recommendations – and I like it better when I can get hundreds of reviews of a restaurant, rather than just one author’s, so I may be able to do away with guide books as well. I do find it painful to get rid of books, growing up with my father who was such an avid book collector, but it will be a relief to just carry one slim Kindle around and a smart phone! I will bring with me one copy of the book I wrote (My Parent has an Autism Spectrum Disorder), just so I don’t forget that publishing a book is now crossed off my bucket list!
