Hi guys I’m new here and I dont know where to post this. ( no its not an invite request bet thats what you thought. )
There seems to be a guy on eBay with a listing right now for the star wars despecialized trilogy probably with the iso types with menus and hes also including tn1 and harmys 35mm scans as well.
He is claiming that the content is free and that there is an honor system that he abides by. This guy is a joke. He claims that the 200 bucks hes charging is just for the cost of the materials and the time it took him to create the set and edit it together.
When really hea probably done very little editing if hes used nvjcs isos . Also printing to discs and printing out disc inserts isnt too expensive or time consuming.
I estimate what hes done costing him no more than about 40 to 50 dollars not the 200 asking price.
Whichever way he describes it hes selling what he shouldnt be selling. Just a heads up and I have reported him.
I went ahead and made myself a set. It has cost me about 125+ to make with professional printing, buying criterion cases, the blank blu-rays, etc… I asked ronwlim here on the site to see if he could make the same box set that he has produced and he quoted me $200. So to ask for $200 isn’t that unreasonable.
I think you are overestimating his costs. What the listing that Captain_Danielsan mentioned talks about is not a “box set” but just a set of blu-ray/DVD cases with burned/printed discs.
I have completed five copies of my box set and my total costs per set (excluding the box) at this point are as follows:
BD50 x 4 = $8.00
BD25 x 6 = $6.00
DVD9 x 1 = $1.00
Criterion Blu-Ray Cases x 4 = $4.00
Paper = $2.00
Ink = $1.00Total = $22.00
The materials cost of my slipacase box is probably another $3.00 - 4.00 per set so even if I included that the total would be under $30.00
That is a LOT of markup to get to $190.00 - $200.00 per set on eBay.
However - even if it was just a few dollars of markup that would be too much when the expressed wishes of the fans who created them are that they would be shared for free and never sold for profit.
I don’t know where you are getting your stuff printed, but most places around me that are willing to print them, which most aren’t due to copyright reasons, have a $25 minimum order and I have to go to a specialty place to get the discs printed on and that put me back $40. And the blu-ray cases are not $4.00, after shipping on casetopia.com I paid $22. The discs after shipping cost more than your total. I know these people on eBay are making a profit. But for some it is just easier to have them make it. I did not have a blu-ray burner I went and bought one so I could do so. There is a demand for them and if you can’t figure out the myspleen invite system, it is very hard to find an invite, so I get why people are paying the premium to get these. I almost caved and did so myself. It took me about a month between paychecks to finally finalize one set. I do understand that people here are getting their stuff taken and made a profit on, that sucks, but when you make it so difficult to get the source material people are going to cave and go the easy way and pay money to get it now.
I’m not trying to get in a big fight here, but my pricing is what I paid per set.
I did get some economies of scale because I knew I wanted to make at least 5 sets for myself and to give as gifts.
BD50 printable 25disc spindle was $49.95 = $2.00/disc
BD25 printable 50disc spindle was $21.00 = $0.42/disc
DVD9 printable 50disc spindle was $27.00 = $0.54/disc
Casetopia Criterion BD cases… my total order for enough cases to do at least 6 sets was $41.00 shipped (20 3 disc cases and 10 2 disc cases) = $1.37/case
Ink $18.95 for 4 sets of ink for my printer - I used less than two full sets of ink cartridges for 5+ sets, including lots of experimental printing = about $1.00 per set for ink
Paper - I used very high quality HP double sided glossy brochure paper $39.99 for 150 sheets. Each set as the eBay poster has advertised would take 4 to 5 sheets of paper total: About $1.25
All of these are still the prices you can purchase these items for today. Yes, it would be expensive on a per-set basis if you just purchased enough to make one set, but that is not what the ebay sellers are doing. They are probably buying in more bulk than I did for my project.
Just because you chose to/needed to go with a more expensive route for the production of your set, doesn’t mean that it has to cost that much - and I certainly would expect that the ebayer is not having the printed materials professionally printed. He even talks about the cost of ink in his product description. He’s not getting them professionally printed.
I understand that some people don’t have the expertise, equipment or time needed to produce a set on their own, but for someone who is interested, you don’t have to spend anything like $125 - $200 to get a set for yourself.
Heck, with all of the above costs, I didn’t include the one piece of equipment I did have to purchase to do this project: a new Canon MX922 printer to print the discs and high-quality inkjet prints for the inserts/brochures. That printer cost me $80.00 (and included enough ink for at least one full set), so even if I added that to the out of pocket cost for the first set, I still came in under $110.00
It took me a while to get an invitation to MySpleen in order to download the torrents so I could burn my disc… in the interim while I was waiting, I was posting here, exploring what I wanted my box set to look like, etc.
I was treating this like what it was meant to be… a hobby and a community based around a beloved movie from when I was a kid.
The people who are willing to pay $200 on ebay for a set are the smaller part of the problem. The vast majority of them were never going to come here (or other similar sites online) and seek out these discs.
But it is disingenuous to try to give the ebayers a pass because they are only charging a “reasonable” markup for their efforts. They are selling to an audience that doesn’t know or care about this place and by selling it at all… especially at the profit margins they are making… they are risking waking the sleeping bear of Disney/LucasFilm who have so far not taken any action against these fan projects that definitely violate copyright law.