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Old 03-08-2013, 09:36 AM   #1
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Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music

Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music

The distinction between owning a physical book and licensing/renting an ebook is being challenged in the courts and in the marketplace. Would you like to see secondhand digital marketplaces happen?
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Old 03-08-2013, 10:32 AM   #2
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No. Digital media don't degrade - there's no difference between a new ebook and a "used" one, whereas there's all the difference in the world between a new paper book and a secondhand one. There would be absolutely no reason to buy a new ebook if "secondhand" ebooks were available. It would destroy the market.
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Old 03-08-2013, 11:50 AM   #3
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No. Digital media don't degrade - there's no difference between a new ebook and a "used" one, whereas there's all the difference in the world between a new paper book and a secondhand one. There would be absolutely no reason to buy a new ebook if "secondhand" ebooks were available. It would destroy the market.
Regular wear and tear has never mattered to me when absorbed in reading. Nothing short of missing pages, liquid soaked pages precluding page turning, or other sorts of impossible to ignore damage ever ruins my reading. Unless we're talking about collectible or souvenir/trophy value of physical books, degradation doesn't factor into the resale equation for me.

Timeliness, on the other hand, could be made to be common to both physical and ebooks (as well as music and video) and would actually enable the secondhand market to exist without destroying the first-sale market. Preventing plural possession of ebooks is all it takes. The question I wonder about is whether it's worth artificially mimicking the delays intrinsic to the secondhand physical book market in order to benefit from the ability to buy (and sell) secondhand ebooks. Are the benefits of a secondhand ebook market worth these arguably unnatural restrictions? Are there other ways a secondhand ebook market could be viable without going against the e-grain?
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Old 03-08-2013, 11:56 AM   #4
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Preventing plural possession of ebooks is all it takes.
That, unfortunately, is a non-trivial problem, and one which needs to be overcome before you could have such a market. How could you prevent someone from selling the same 2nd-hand ebook to 10 or 100 different buyers? The problem is that there's nothing to distinguish the copy from the original.
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Old 03-08-2013, 08:42 PM   #5
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That, unfortunately, is a non-trivial problem, and one which needs to be overcome before you could have such a market. How could you prevent someone from selling the same 2nd-hand ebook to 10 or 100 different buyers? The problem is that there's nothing to distinguish the copy from the original.
I suspect the problem is trivial enough, if there comes a pressing need for such a solution (probably involving a court decision somewhre...). After all, large chunks of it already exist, in both theory and practice via "watermarking", DRM systems, etc.
As I see it, the big non-trivial problem is that up to now, it's been to the advantage of the Marketplace seller (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.) to not allow a universal DRM method, and the bulk of publishers are dead-set against the implications, since they've always hated used books anyway.
With "universal" DRM, and a system similar to that used for music on Microsoft's Zune platform (at least as it's been explained to me, since I never owned one), one could buy a song, lend that song to a friend, etc-- once lent, it wouldn't be available for your use until it was 'returned'. With a universal DRM and watermarking, a title could be lent or sold at will, like a book or a CD.
(Yeah, I know, I sound like I'm in favor of that dastardly DRM-- yep, I am, if it was properly configured to let me lend/sell digital media like I can the hard-copy media.)
Yes, I'm sure such a system is 'breakable' by those with sufficient profit motive and inclination to do so-- just as the current system is breakable. The remaining problem is as Harry's example-- how does a used copy differ from a "new one", thereby potentially undermining the cost of the new one. (Although my personal paper book needs match those of hughes, and I don't really care at all about normal wear and tear.)
Well, I imagine we already see part of that, where backlist books are typically cheaper than new releases. Ease of access will also always justify a higher price for non-hassle "bookstore" acquisition.
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Old 03-11-2013, 07:53 AM   #6
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It's a simple problem to solve imo.

They cannot and should not try to stop* people copying books many times and handing them out/selling them, because lets face it, they cannot stop that, piracy happens and is already happening with DRM in existence.

Two unscrupulous users will never be stopped by any system they can create.

What they _should_ tackle though, is how to prevent a single unscrupulous person selling an ebook/other digital item to an _honest_ person. That imo is a very solvable problem.

If each officially licensed vendor had to provide a way to transfer licenses then problem solved.

Ideally there'd be a common backend that all vendors would plug into to allow license transfers, but more realistically we'd end up seeing Amazon provide their own way to transfer between amazon accounts, adobe provide ways to transfer between theirs etc

As long as it's free to sign up for an account and perform the transfer though, then it wouldn't matter if there was a single backend or multiple. Resales of digital items could now occur anywhere with the final transfer taking place in a way that the end buyer can be 100% certain the item they've bought is a legally licensed one and that the seller isn't just reselling the same item again and again.

Each vendor could also offer to handle payment during the transfer and take a cut of processing fees. That would reduce the number of scams that could occur as the site can be certain the sale is a valid license and not transfer it until payment has cleared.

The snag, well that's the people who sell DRM free ebooks and don't yet have any kind of infrastructure in place to handle licenses and transfers. But they can either trust their customers or sign up to an inevitable 3rd party offering from Adobe or similar. Books can remain DRM free, Adobe would only be there to track that a license exists and to respond to transfer requests.

Why hasn't this happened? well that's simple, it hasn't and will not happen unless it becomes legal to resell digital items. Soon as that happens, there's a need to solve the problem, until then those involved are much happier about people not been able to sell items on so there's no incentive to solve the problem.

We may see something like this start with software though based on the EU case that looked at reselling digital applications. If that eventually occurs (it'll take another law tackling the DRM side that currently makes resale worthless first imo) then maybe it'll creep into other digital sales too.

* by adding DRM, they should pursue and stop people who are illegally selling books or distributing them online but this shouldn't impact legal customers.

Last edited by JoeD; 03-11-2013 at 08:04 AM.
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Old 03-11-2013, 01:00 PM   #7
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There's a short news item on Develop about Amazon/Apple patenting tech to allow digital resales (ignoring that it's a patent and I hate software patents) it also mentions the EU ruling.
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Old 03-11-2013, 04:22 PM   #8
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Apple sucks and Amazon already has too much control in the ebook market. I would rather see lower prices on ebooks since we are just paying a licensing fee.
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