Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
... I also think that the percentage of books ending up in the second hand market is pretty low. If this percentage was near 100% I do not think that publishers would accept it. They accept second hand selling now because it is not so big and it give some advantage for the publishers by making a book more well known.
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It's not up to the publishers to accept it or not - this became
legally established in 1908 (in the USA). Books are a physical object which we, as a society, have determined to be transferrable.
Even if only 10% of people resell their books, those 10% of people still do place a value upon that ability, and are prepared to pay more for their books than they would otherwise (if they were hypothetically only "licensing" the read). This affects the supply-and-demand graph - thus publishers are consequently able to charge more and authors get paid more. Likewise if people merely value the ability to donate old books to charity.