Quote:
Originally Posted by Parataxis
The thing that prevents publishers/sellers from restricting people from swapping or reselling their paperbacks is... the law. In Commonlaw jurisdictions, the first-sale doctrine allows the reselling of copyrighted works that have been previously purchased.
How the gov't is letting the e-publishers get away with violating this is beyond me. Instead of setting up DRM to prevent lending/selling/giving away, it would be much more in compliance with the doctrine if the DRM was set to ensure that if you did lend or sell your copy, you no longer had access to it - if the libraries can manage that, I don't see why the publishers cannot.
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I don't think that people would be happy only being able to keep a purchased book for a certain length of time and AFAIK that is the only difference between library DRM and regular DRM.
Eventually there might be a foolproof method of DRM but this will not make it real easy to sell an ebook.
1. the book would have to be removed from all of a person's registered devices by the vender or publisher. If a device was lost, stolen, broken or not internet enabled the book could not be removed.
2. There would probably be a fee for the DRM transfer.
3. It would not be easy for people to sell ebooks
a. To sell to an unknown individual, a cash transfer method such as paypal would have to be used or either the buyer or seller would have to travel to the person's house spending time and money on transport, so for a 9.99 ebook assuming transport was $5.00 the price would have to be well under $4.99 to make it worth the buyers time. If you are paying close to the regular price, most would just buy it through regular channels. Selling on Ebay or Amazon might be easier but still a fee involved.
b. The market would be saturated within a few days for best sellers. Fast readers would benefit, slower readers would be looking at selling for 99 cents less any fees.
The only benefit would be to buyers who waited till the second hand price hit bottom or those who wanted to trade/lend books to people they know and there would still be a fee and a process to go through which many would resent.
Helen