I'm in the final stages of liquidating a 10-year collection of (mostly) anime tapes. My experiences:
* Nobody wants tapes anymore. This is not 100% true, but it's becoming more so every day. Half Price Books - where I sold all of mine - was willing to give about 50 cents each. It varies from store to store.
* I couldn't even give the tapes away to friends with kids who were into anime. It was like, "Let me borrow them to copy to a DVD, then you can have them back." Digisubs and P2P were other reasons to avoid owning tapes.
* E-Bay wasn't worth the trouble. Take a look at the prices people are offering over there, when they're offering at all. Factor in the hassle of dealing with PayPal, personal checks, packing and mailing...it's not worth it.
* E-Bay may be good for very rare items, however. If you have a copy of
Robot Carnival, you'd probably get a good price. But sell it before the R1 DVD is released (!).
* DVDs will get you a little more, but not much. Half Price Books was giving me about one dollar per DVD - which they would re-sell at $7.49.
* The
AWA phpBB page has a trading forum you might want to look at. Can't say it will be much help, though.