Films!

At last! Finally! Other such time based exclamations!

Filmipood and Apollo have finally consummated their union, allowing me to purchase Estonian DVDs through my favourite Estonian bookshop. This makes me very happy.

And to think that, some time ago, I firmly believed that there should be a demarcation between books and videos when it came to specialty stores! After all, you never see a DVD store selling books, so book stores should avoid selling DVDs. Take a look at what happened to music stores once they started selling DVDs. These days, the music is a secondary consideration, with most shelf space dedicated to the other medium. I wouldn't want the same thing to happen to books.

Fortunately, it seems we don't put enough faith in the ability of books to stick around regardless of how often we declare reading is dead. It seems people will always buy books (if only because they can't think of a decent mothers' day present), so bookshops never really need to lose shelf-space to other media. Sure, certain genres of books may be constantly under threat, and your favourite author may drop out of sight, but those books are being pushed out by other, more popular books, not CDs and DVDs.

For some time now, I've had no trouble at all purchasing books from Estonia for my crazy "let's teach yourself Estonian" project through the awesome Apollo. Even when I was actually in Estonia, I still found Apollo to be my favourite book store. My only complaint was that they didn't sell movies and television series, which are also important for learning languages.

In spite of my amazing librarian powers, I had been unsuccessful at finding an online store that would sell DVDs to Australia. Not from lack of tracking down people to ask, but more from lack of having people respond to my emails. Asking questions can only get you so far, at some point you need to have someone answer you. So, while I was in Estonia last year, I made a point of finding the names of some DVD chains in the belief that I would be able to track down their websites upon my return to Oz. I should have made a point of buying DVDs, but I had already taken up too much space in my luggage with books.

Filmipood was the most logical candidate, but they didn't obviously send stuff overseas. They finally responded to an email enquiry saying they would ship to Australia, it would just cost extra.

Huzzah! Thought I, and promptly started using my amazing librarian powers (and IMDB.com) to try to track down the titles of DVDs which would be most useful as entry points. I don't have buckets of money, so I wanted to get as much bang for my buck as I could manage. I wanted television series for the continuation of characters and potential redundancy of vocabulary, as well as children's films for the potential simplicity of vocabulary, as well as something I'll actually enjoy watching so that I can watch it multiple times and just absorb the vocabulary instead of finding it a begrudging exercise.

Why, yes, I am applying Extensive Reading schemata to authentic video. Why do you ask? Oh, you didn't? Well, never mind.

Anyway, having done my research and narrowed the field down to three items on which I wanted to spend money, I tried to order them - only to find there was no way to change the delivery address to somewhere outside of Estonia, and no way to pay except to use one of the major banks in Estonian (of which I am not a member). This was disheartening, but for some reason they sent me an email with the details of the DVDs I almost ordered... and I noticed that email was also CCd to a department within Apollo!

"Aha!" says I, "Filmipood and Apollo are merged or merging!" No one seemed to think it was odd that I would say such a thing. I guess the people who sit near me are used to hearing me spout out such inanities apparently incongruously. Not long after that, I managed to find all of the DVDs I wanted through Apollo and order them without problems.

Ah, Apollo. Now all you need to do is start selling Estonian CDs and you will truly be the Amazon of Estonia.

Anyway, over the weekend I watched the first of my new stash of Eesti DVDs - A movie called Ruudi.

Review to follow.