Friday, August 24, 2012

Another Reason to Go Digital: More on the Move

You may have read KC's post about the struggles of moving a large comic collection. He estimated 400 boxes of comics. Turned out, once we got a final count, that there were 480 comic short boxes on the truck. (Oh, and they didn't end up reboxing them, thankfully.) Now, a few of them contain stacks of Archive volumes or similar, but that's still an awful lot of periodicals.

With a new home comes a new home insurance policy, and I noticed they had an interesting clause about Memorabilia, which includes 'souvenirs and collector's items such as trading cards, comic books' and similar articles for which the age, history, scarcity, and condition contribute substantially to their value.' We don't have many particularly rare or valuable single issues; it's just that when you count them all up, there are a lot of them. It's the sheer quantity.

But that clause means, to get the comics insured, I need a rider that spells out what's being covered. Which means I need an inventory and an appraisal. Neither of those are a problem ' the former just takes time, and we know people locally in the industry who would be recognized as experts in the field for the latter. The problem is the quote I got. For $300,000 worth of coverage, it's $4800 a year extra.

(And $300,000 isn't enough. Figure 200 comics a box x 450 boxes (rounding down from the count) = 90,000 comics x average $4 replacement cost = $360,000.)

That's a lot of money that doesn't apply if the comics are in book form (so collections are cheaper to keep than issues) or digital (where replacement is a heck of a lot easier). So yet another reason to move to more preferable formats.



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