(Radio Iowa) – The co-owner of Iowa’s largest and oldest used book store reports an unexpected surge in the sale of movies on V-H-S tape, a medium most of us haven’t thought about since Blockbuster went bankrupt more than a dozen years ago. Stephen Zbornik, at Source Book Store in downtown Davenport, says droves of customers in their 20s and 30s are checking out with armloads of decades-old movies on V-H-S.
“We live in a digital world, right? Everything is computerized and digital and crisp and clear and perfect and high-res,” Zbornik says. “I think that some of the gritty nature of the VHS tape is appealing, for sure.” The book store has been in business since 1939 and has perhaps 70-thousand books on its labyrinth of shelves. They’ve carved out space in a basement corner solely devoted to V-H-S movies, though Zbornik says he doesn’t even think V-C-Rs are still being made.
“Not that I’m aware of. It’s my understanding that there might be a manufacturer in Japan bringing them back, but they’re very hard to come by,” Zbornik says. “We try to grab them when we can so that we can provide them to folks here and there, but we don’t have any in the store.” One 20-something customer said he found a used V-C-R at a Goodwill Industries thrift store, and it still works like new. He was snapping up V-H-S copies of “Gremlins,” “Pretty Woman,” and “Clueless,” popular popcorn movies from the 1980s and ’90s.
The quality of movies on V-H-S pales compared to the crisp resolution of a D-V-D, but Zbornik says that doesn’t seem to matter to the youthful buyers of plastic rectangular videotapes, as they’re in it for the nostalgia. “I am not surprised at all by a return to physical media,” Zbornik says. “The modern era has kind of been thrust down everybody’s throats like, you know, the myth of progress, and nobody owns anything anymore.” Zbornik says the store’s V-H-S tape sales this year are easily double D-V-D sales, and he suspects staple streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Apple T-V may soon follow Blockbuster.
“The subscription model, I think, is less and less appealing as it costs more and more. You subscribe to three different streaming services and not even be able to see the movie that you want to see, for example,” he says. “People want something that’s real and tangible. They want to own it. They want to touch it. They want to smell it. They want to be able to revisit it. They want to share it with their friends.”
Zbornik credits the store’s co-owner, Anne Brown, with predicting the V-H-S resurgence, and she continues to procure and stock hundreds and hundreds of titles. The last pre-recorded V-H-S tapes were made in 2006, while V-C-Rs haven’t rolled off the assembly line since 2016. As for book sales, Zbornik says they’re seeing a renaissance of interest in the classics, like Orwell, Hesse, Steinbeck, and the Bronte sisters — he says he can hardly keep them in stock. For true old-school music collectors, the store also has many racks filled with used vinyl records and C-Ds, and even several shelves of cassettes and eight-track tapes.
