You can buy used and new physical media online if you know what you are looking for. For used material, you can find a large selection on US-based sites including Germanthriftbooks.com, Thriftbooks, Abebooks, eBay and Facebook groups for German-speaking families in the US. It can be harder to purchase new books, as the major German booksellers such as Thalia or Dussmann do not ship to the US, but Amazon.de or Amazon.com can be okay options (the selection is smaller and shipping can be significantly more than the sellers mentioned above). Until the recent tariff changes, German used book reseller Medimops was often the most cost effective option.

The major US-based sellers for new books are Kinderbooks, which sells a curated selection of German kids books and learning materials, and GreatBookPrices, which sells many different genres and languages via Abebooks. There is also KinderbooksNYC, which is a subscription book rental service. I haven’t used it, but you may want to give one of their plans a try.

A note on buying DVDs: German DVDs will be region 4, which requires a region 4 DVD player (inconvenient) or an unlocked DVD player (expensive), which is not great for occasional viewing, but can be worth it if you watch a lot of DVDs. For most families, using streaming to access video content is probably more convenient (see below).