Ash Ketchum

I’m going through my anime collection and realizing I have tons of titles I’ll probably never watch, so I’d like to find a home for them. We’re talking hundreds of DVDs, either complete series, partial series or one-off titles. I know I can sell them at Book Off but that involves multiple trips on the subway carrying two shopping bags of DVDs at a time, since they don’t come and pick up. And they don't pay much. I used to donate them to Salvation Army, but the one in shopping cart distance closed and the nearest one now requires a bus trip. If I’m going to go to that trouble I might as well take them to Book Off and at least get some money for them. A friend with a pickup truck has offered to help me take boxes of DVDs to Salvation Army if necessary, but I haven’t checked out the nearest one yet to see if they’ll even take them. (The old one also took anime VHS—and the ones I donated always sold well!) No public libraries here will accept donations anymore.

I don’t have the time, energy or patience to sell individual items by eBay or ship to individual fans, even though I'm sure a lot of stuff I've gathered over the last 20-odd years is out of print and possibly quite rare now. Unless there's an easy way to find out which anime titles are most in-demand and if I have any of those I can try and sell those. .

Any suggestions?

dex14

I'm sure there's some here that could look at what you have an advise on rarity.

Post an ad on craigslist saying you have a large collection, must be picked up.

PhantomStranger

The Craigslist idea is probably your best bet given your constraints. Or put it in one giant lot on eBay and start the bidding at 1 penny or something with shipping added on top.

TheBigDave

I know it's a lot of work, but it can be worth it. Some individual discs go for $50-$100 each. And some box sets can go for a couple hundred dollars. There's lots of anime stuff that's been OOP for a long time. And anime collectors will pay big bucks for it on eBay.

Just go to eBay, set the filter to "Show Only > Sold Items", and search each title.

fujishig

When I moved a few years back I unfortunately had to chuck a bunch of 'em... they all had case damage in some way and I had long since replaced or duplicated them but it still felt bad. The ebay thing is a lot of work but the only way to get value out of it, otherwise you can go to a local anime/comic store if you have one but they will basically lowball you, do the ebay work, and chuck the rest anyway. Might as well see if you have some diamonds in the rough (and you probably know anime well enough to know what's been long out of print and not license rescued).

milo bloom

FaceBook Marketplace is also a decent place to sell stuff. My wife uses it fairly often.

TheBigDave

Years ago, I bought a cheap UPC barcode scanner for going through my DVD collection. It was only about $15. It made it easy to quickly check eBay listings. I had thousands of DVDs and it saved me a lot of time.

These days, there's probably some free mobile apps that will use the phone's camera to scan the UPC barcode and show eBay results.

milo bloom

The eBay app itself will do this but you have to filter the results each time to find the completed listings to get a good gauge of the price.

story

If you decide all of the selling stuff is not worth your time and energy (and I hope it is), our oldest has fallen in love with anime and would likely watch and appreciate what you have to spare. She's a young teen, so nothing with too much fan service and/or too esoteric. She loves Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia, stuff like that, but also appreciated some of the old school Bubblegum Crash stuff that I showed her. I can pay shipping, but if you use my name and address to dox me then I will have to destroy you, nothing personal.

PhantomStranger

That took a dark turn very quickly...