I envy you your space for DVDs. Still, I hope you'll let me know how things turn out in twenty years' time. I used to collect instruments, books, discs and music scores until there was no room to move. Then I was forced to make painful decisions. I hope that won't happen to you. Here's an interesting story about an extreme example of that: The plight of Kim's Video, once the best movie rental service in Manhattan: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/nyregion/thecity/08kims.html It's a news story with the plot of one of Borges's Ficciones.
That's precisely why I'm currently ripping all my DVDs onto Tb hard-drives and then leaving the discs at home for my mum, and obtaining all future films through illegal means. By the time I'm done with my grand archival project, I'll own every TV show and film I ever want to see, and it will occupy about 25 square inches of physical space. Win Honestly, I used to buy everything and it got silly, my DVDs filled half a room by the time I left home. Nobody has that much space just for films. edit - also, the resolution on DVDs isn't mind-blowing. First time I saw a blu-ray film, that DVD collection started to become a source of irritation and regret more than anything else.
My introduction to Blu-Ray occurred years ago in the late lamented Qualia Room at the Sonystyle Store in NYC: A chapter from Lawrence of Arabia projected by the Q004 onto a screen that took up the space of two full walls. The medium hadn't been announced officially; nothing was available save those too-brief moments of incredulity. That was enough to compel me to buy a PS3 a few years later (though not enough to restart my space-vampirizing collection). Personally, I've been learning to kiss the joy as it flies and not collect every film, album, book or game just because I might enjoy it occasionally. I only buy things I'm certain I'll never find again, and only when they seem indispensable. Speaking of cumbersome collections and the lost art of never finding one's DVDs, you and the OP might appreciate this morsel from a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop (above-mentioned author of "The Man-Moth"), which is a free translation of Octavio Paz: From "One Art", by Elizabeth Bishop "The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. "Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. "I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned -- two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster."
