Save Money, Get Your DVDs from the Library
Watching 3 DVDs, that’s part of my weekend plan. Seraphine, a French movie, and two American comedies – Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Renee Zellweger’s My One and Only. Oh yea, I got them from the LA Central Public Library. For FREE!
When we mention renting DVDs, most people would think of Blockbuster, Netflix, Redbox (or local video/DVDs stores) but for me, I’ve been borrowing DVDs from the libraries for years, especially from the LAPL’s branches.
In recent years, the libraries seem to add more new release DVDs to their list. The Chinatown branch for example, has many Chinese movies (both Mandarin and Cantonese); and the Central Library offers a huge collection of foreign movies from all over the world besides popular/English movies.
To my surprise, according to an article in the Consumerist, more people are getting DVDs from library than from Netflix or Redbox. According to the survey released by the Online Computer Library Center, public libraries in the U.S. lend an average 2.1 million videos/day, which edges out the 2 million discs shipped by Netflix and almost as much as the combined total of DVD rentals at Redbox (1.4 million) and Blockbuster (1.2 million). Another recent report says that libraries have doubled the size of their movie collections over the last decade - and library users have taken notice (so I was right).
Probably Netflix still has an advantage of offers more new release DVDs and more diverse genres, but you need to pay certain rental fees. In contrast, borrowing from LAPL is FREE. Under the current economy circumstance, borrowing DVDs from the libraries is obviously a smart way to save money!
Most of the DVDs are under 2-day loan, and 7-day loan for documentaries and educational materials. The trick is, LAPL is closed on Monday now, so if you borrow the DVDs on Friday, your due date is on the following Tuesday. You will have at least 4 days to watch those DVDs. What a bargain!
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